Susan Cooper was born in 1935 in Buckinghamshire, England. She attributes much of her fascinating with writing, especially fantasy, to her earliest years during the Blitz; her family spent many nights in their backyard air-raid shelter while anti-aircraft guns fired at German planes that passed overhead and dropped bombs on the countryside. Homes were blacked out at night to make it harder for the bombers to target villages, so Susan read by candlelight. Cooper’s experience of huddling in the dark with her family while a cataclysmic war went on over her head inspired in her a strong sense of good and evil as concrete powers rather than abstract ideas. This would shape the mythology she created in the Dark Is Rising series, where good and evil are material agents.

Susan read and wrote almost constantly as a child—plays, stories, and an attempted autobiography. She turned to editing her school magazine, and after graduating from high school, she studied English at Oxford University from 1953-1955. Both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were dons of the college and dictated that the English department syllabus focus on Middle English works or romances like those of Mallory and Spencer.