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Born June 25, 1910 ("half past Christmas," as she liked to say) in Highland Park, Illinois, Elizabeth Orton Jones was the daughter of George Roberts and Jessie Mae Orton Jones. She graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932 and continued her education a the Ecole de beaux Arts, Fontainebleau, France, and the Art Institute of chicago.

During the 1930s, Jones achieved a substantial reputation as the creator fo excellelnt dry-point etchings of children. At the same time, she began two long and successful careers in the design of greeting-cards and the production of painted woodenware.

In 1938, Oxford University Press brought out Jones' first book Ragman of Paris. Author of eight books and illustrator of fourteen others, she was runner-up for the Caldecott Medal (awarded each year by the American Library Association to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children)in 1943 for Small Rain: Verses from the Bible, edited by her mother, Jessie Orton Jones. She won the Caldecott Medal in 1945 for Prayer for a Child by Rachel Field. In her acceptance speech, she said: "Drawing is very like a prayer. Drawing is a reaching fro something away beyond you. As you sit down to work in the morning, you feel as if you were on top of a hill. And it is as if you were seeing for the first time."

The success of her work during the 1930s and the 1940s enabled Jones to buy a house in Mason, New Hampshire. She then devoted her energy and talents to whatever interested her without concern for financial rewards. Jones painted a large mural at Crotched Mountain center, in Greenfield, New Hampshire, and another for the University of New Hampshire Library. Her interest in the Mason City Library and her work in redecorating and in furshing it's Children's Room led to the Library's award of a grant in recognition of its originality. She also taught classes at the local school for a number of years.

Early in the 1060s, she was one of a local group of creative and energetic teachers who started Andy's Summer Theater, an enterprise run by and for children. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Elizabeth Orton Jones was busy writing children's plays which have proven to be highly successful. She also designed and made costumes and scenery for those plays.

Elizabeth Orton Jones and her mother worked together on the book This is the Way, about different religions and the common ground they share. Jones' famous work, Twig, was inspired by a girl she caught sight of while riding on the El train in Chicago.

Although she had no children of her own, she was a lively member of her Mason community and did numerous readings and book signings. Jones almost single-handedly set up the library for children in Mason in 1960, at a time when children's literature was not taken seriously.

Her collaborators include: Gladys Adshead (Brownies—Hush!, What Miranda Knew); Betty Bridgeman (Lullaby for Eggs); and Rachel Field (Prayer for a Child).

Jones was also an accomplished classical artist; she studied with Camille Liausu in Paris, and took classes in abstract art and painting in New Hampshire.

Jones illustrated Little Red Riding Hood for the Little Golden Books series. In the story the grandmother's house was modeled after Jones' own house in Mason, and the wolf's house was modeled after another local house, now a restaurant called Pickity Place. Jones had two houses in Mason, one named Misty Meadow and the other named Rock-A-Bye.

In her acceptance speech for the Caldecott Medal Jones defined her idea of an artist: "I think of being an artist as an achievement I may work toward my whole life and even then not arrive. Though, I would like to be able to say, right out loud to myself on the morning of my 99th birthday, 'Old girl, you are an artist.'"

Elizabeth Orton Jones died at the age of 94, on May 13, 2005, at Monadnock Community Hospital in Peterborough, New Hampshire.