Candice F. Ransom (born July 10, 1952) is a popular children's and young-adult author. She has written over 150 books as of June 2020, including 18 books for The Boxcar Children series, The Time Spies series and the Sunfire series. She wrote the Dungeons & Dragons novel, Key to the Griffon's Lair (October 2005). Her work includes picture books, easy readers, middle grade fiction, biographies, and nonfiction. More than 45 of her titles have been translated into 12 languages. Early years Ransom was born on July 10, 1952 in Washington, D.C. and was raised in Centreville, Virginia. Her parents are Thomas Garland and Irene Dellinger Farris. Her experiences growing up in rural Virginia, especially those as a student at Robert Frost Junior High School, provided ideas for her books' plots and characters. As a child, Ransom wanted to grow up to be a "Writer-detective-veterinarian-artist". She wrote her first book at age 7 because she had finished reading all the books for her grade at the school library. After that she scribbled stories in her spare time, usually casting herself as the star who had all the fun and solved all the mysteries, inventing the adventures that were in short supply in real life. "I was a very nerdy kid. And I didn't have a best friend until I was in fifth grade, so I wrote stories about how I imagined life could be." In her senior year of high school Ransom began writing in earnest, and she made a commitment to herself to become an author; she decided to become a children's author because she loved children's books best of all. Career Lacking the finances to go to college, Ransom wrote magazine articles in her spare time while she earned a living as a secretary. Her first two submissions to publishers were a book titled “Mystery of the Hidden Carousel”, which was sent to Harper, and a picture book about a mouse (text and colored pen drawings on the same page), which was sent to Whitman. "The mystery came back with tire tracks across the envelope. The picture book disappeared down a mouse hole." Her first published book, The Silvery Pass, came out in 1982. The next big step in Ransom's career came when her publisher called with the chance to write a four-hundred-page historical novel for teens. This offer turned into the first two novels of the highly successful