Elaine Ford grew up in a small New Jersey town where she haunted the library and dreamed of becoming a writer. As a college student, she was influenced by a professor who emphasized the value of significant detail and an economy of language and by the writing of Thomas Hardy, Bernard Malamud, and T.S. Eliot. Her mother's death in the early 1970s spurred her to focus more on writing, which eventually led to the publication of her first novel in 1980. She moved to Maine in 1985 and taught writing and literature at the University of Maine for roughly two decades until her death in 2017. Her novels include The Playhouse (1980), Monkey Bay (1989), and Life Designs (1997), and she published more than 50 works of short fiction in literary magazines and newspapers.