child. Her father, Louis Rosenfeld, was a bookkeeper for a railway; her mother, Caroline Gewecke Rosenfeld, was a seamstress and story teller. Her father died when Estes was young, and her mother's dressmaking provided for the family. Eleanor Estes attributes her love of reading, children's literature, and storytelling to her parent's fondness for books, and her mother's "inexhaustible supply of songs, stories, and anecdotes, with which she entertained us with while cooking dinner." In 1923, after graduating from West Haven High School, she trained at the New Haven Free Library, and became a children's librarian there.