Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, whose memoir about living as a child in an internment camp during World War II put a personal stamp on the hysteria that led the United States government to imprison some 120,000 Japanese Americans, died on Dec. 21 at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 90.

Her son, Joshua Houston, confirmed the death.

In March 1942, Jeanne, then 7, along with her nine siblings, her mother and her maternal grandmother, were forced to leave their home in Santa Monica, Calif., for the Manzanar War Relocation Center, a detention camp that had been hastily built on 5,000 acres in the Mojave Desert.

It was one of 10 camps, mostly in Western states, established under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which he signed in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The order resulted in the military evacuation of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast on the largely unsupported suspicion that they represented a threat to national security.

Jeanne’s father, Ko Wakatsuki, a commercial fisherman from Hiroshima, did not go with his family. The F.B.I. arrested him soon after Pearl Harbor, accusing him of using his fishing boat to smuggle oil to Japanese submarines off the coast of California. He was sent to a military prison at Fort Lincoln in Bismarck, N.D. His family says that the accusation was false.

He rejoined his family at Manzanar nine months later. During that time, one of his daughters had given birth to his first grandchild at Manzanar, and two other daughters were pregnant. The family saw a changed, somewhat broken, man in his 50s step off a bus.

“He had aged 10 years,” Ms. Houston recalled in “Farewell to Manzanar” (1973), written with James D. Houston, her husband. “He looked over 60, gaunt, wilted as his shirt, underweight, leaning on that cane and favoring his right leg. He stood there surveying his clan, and nobody moved, not even Mama, waiting to see what he would do or say, waiting for some cue from him as to how we should deal with this.”

She added: “I thought I should be laughing and welcoming him home. But I started to cry. By this time everyone was crying.”

The book recounts the more than three years Ms. Houston and about 10,000 other Japanese Americans endured at the camp until the war ended. Given its location at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, the weather could be fiercely hot or freezing cold. The area was also prone to severe winds that kicked up billows of dust. She was often sick, at first from typhoid shots and then from food that spoiled because of improper refrigeration.

Books provided by charitable groups became her salvation. Until a library was opened in a barracks, books piled up outside, where they provided a small mountain for children to climb on. But Jeanne became fascinated by what was inside; she discovered the joys of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, James Fenimore Cooper’s historical novels and Nancy Drew mysteries.

“Books became my major form of recreation, my channel to worlds outside the confined and monotonous routine of camp life,” she wrote in an essay for the reference work Contemporary Authors in 1992.

The family left Manzanar in October 1945, about two months after Japan surrendered to the Allies.

Ms. Houston would not tell her story for many years.

Jeanne Toyo Wakatsuki was born on June 26, 1934, in Inglewood, Calif. Her father had been a farmer as well as a fisherman, and her mother, Riku (Sugai) Wakatsuki, managed the home.

Jeanne’s desire to be a writer started in seventh grade while she was living in a housing project in Long Beach, Calif. She wrote an essay for a school writing contest about hunting with her family for grunion, a small, silvery fish, and was asked to join a new journalism class and then to edit the junior high school newspaper.

She also wrote for her high school newspaper and majored in journalism for two years at San Jose State College (now University). But she switched to sociology and social welfare after the head of the journalism department discouraged her, saying that an Asian woman would have no prospects for a newspaper job.

She graduated in 1956 with a bachelor’s degree and began work as a group counselor for teenage girls in a juvenile detention hall. A year later, she married Mr. Houston, who would become known for his novels about the promise, harshness and beauty of California.

Her memories of Manzanar remained suppressed. Her family did not want to discuss the trauma and humiliation of their imprisonment.

“When I was a child, it was not just bad to be a Japanese, it was almost criminal,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2001. “My self-image suffered — I felt as though I had bombed Pearl Harbor.”

But one day in 1971, her nephew Gary Nishikawa, who had been born in Manzanar and was taking a college course where the subject of the camp arose, asked her to tell him about it. When she suggested that he talk to his parents, he said they were reluctant.

So she talked. She told him about the movie theater, the baseball games, the rock gardens, the lousy food and the dust storms.

But he pressed her to go further, to tell him how she felt about being locked up.

“Feel? How did I feel?” she recalled in her Contemporary Authors essay. “For the first time I dropped the protective cover of humor and nonchalance. I allowed myself to feel. I began to cry. I couldn’t stop crying.”

He had “opened a wound I had long denied ever existed,” she wrote.

Over the next year, Ms. Houston tape-recorded her memories. She and her husband talked to other internees, including family members, and scoured libraries for information. She described “Farewell to Manzanar” as personally therapeutic and a record for her many nieces and nephews, seven of whom had been born there.

A New York Times review called it “all in all, a dramatic, telling account of one of the most reprehensible events in the history of America’s treatment of its minorities.” “Farewell to Manzanar” has sold 1.6 million copies domestically, according to its publisher, HarperCollins.

In 1976, Ms. Houston, her husband and John Korty adapted the book into a TV movie, also called “Farewell to Manzanar,” which Mr. Korty directed.

The teleplay received an Emmy nomination and won a Humanitas Prize for its exploration of the human condition.

In 1985, Ms. Houston published “Beyond Manzanar: Views of Asian-American Womanhood,” a collection of essays and short stories. She also collaborated with Paul G. Hensler on “Don’t Cry, It’s Only Thunder” (1984), a book about his work with Vietnamese orphans in the 1960s.

In 2003 she published a novel, “The Legend of Fire Horse Woman,” about a Japanese woman who comes to the United States in an arranged marriage in 1902 and 40 years later is incarcerated in Manzanar with her daughter and granddaughter.

In addition to her son, Ms. Houston is survived by two daughters, Corinne Riku Houston and Gabrielle Houston-Neville, and a brother, Kiyo Wakatsuki. Her husband died in 2009.

Ms. Houston was reluctant to attend commemorative events at Manzanar — now a national historic site run by the U.S. National Park Service — but in 2002 she was among 1,300 people who went to Watsonville, Calif., to re-enact a roundup of Japanese Americans. According to an account by The Associated Press, they reported to a government building, boarded old buses and were taken to an area where they were “imprisoned” behind metal gates.

“I hate to say it,” she said at the time. “We’re kind of dying out, we internees. Let’s keep doing it for those of us who can still remember.”