Jetta Carleton (1913-1999) was born in Holden, Missouri. After spending her childhood with her older sisters on her parents' farm, she attended university. She earned a master's degree in English Literature and worked as a teacher for a time and soon after she moved to the East Coast of the United States to pursue advertising. Summer stays at her parents' house with her sisters inspired her first and only published novel, Four Sisters (1962), which quickly became a best seller.

In 1970, after leaving the world of advertising, she started a small publishing company in Santa Fe, New Mexico, called The Lightning Tree, with the help of Jene Lyon, her husband. In the mid-nineties, after becoming a widow, she began writing a new novel that was never published.