Helen Joy Davidman was a child product, an American poet, and a writer. She received a master's degree from Columbia University in English literature at the age of twenty in 1935.

For her book of poems, Letter to a Comrade, she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1938 and the Russell Loines Award for Poetry in 1939. She was the author of several books, including two novels.

She was an atheist and after becoming a member of the American Communist Party.
Davidman published her best-known work, Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments, in 1954 with a preface by C. S. Lewis. Lewis impacted her work and conversion and became her second husband after her permanent relocation to England in 1956.

The relationship that developed between Davidman and Lewis has been featured in a television BBC film, a stage play, and a theatrical film named Shadowlands. Lewis published A Grief Observed under a pseudonym in 1961, from notebooks he kept after his wife's demise indicating his immense grief and a period of doubting God.

Davidman was a child prodigy, who scored above 150 on IQ testing, with outstanding critical, analytical, and musical skills. She read H. G. Wells's The Outline of History at the age of eight and was able to play a score of Chopin on the piano after having read it once and not looking at it again. At an early age, she read George MacDonald's children's books and his adult fantasy book, Phantastes. She wrote about the influence of these stories: "They developed in me a lifelong taste for fantasy, which led me years later to C. S. Lewis, who in turn led me to religion."