Background

Sally Benson was born Sara Mahala Redway Smith on September 3, 1900, in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Alonzo Redway Smith, a cotton broker, and Anna Prophater. The family moved to New York City when she was eleven.

Education

Sally graduated from Horace Mann High School in Bronx, but she was not a good student and had no interest in college.

Career

Sally began working at National City Bank, first "singing into dictaphones" and then as a foreign exchange bankteller. Her writing career began with a job interviewing minor celebrities in the arts for the New York Morning Telegraph. She also reviewed books and movies, often at a rate of one per day.

In 1930, Benson wrote her first piece of fiction, a short story called "Apartment Hotel. " Starting at the top, she sold it to the New Yorker, which asked for more stories. From that beginning, the magazine accepted all but one of the stories she submitted. The one they refused, "The Overcoat, " was published by American Mercury and became an O. Henry prize story for 1935. Her long association with the New Yorker was due in part to the editor's appreciation of her writing style, with its sophisticated wit and "venomous satire on human foibles, " and to her claim that she hadn't tried other markets. "My style fits here and it wouldn't most places, " she said.

She also wrote stories under the pseudonym "Esther Evarts" and specialized in reviews of mystery stories for the New Yorker. Her preference for mysteries, she once explained, arose from her liking for "straight history over historical novels" as well as her dislike for certain authors. "Why must all the men novelists get so damned virile, so chest-out, shoulders back, here-we-come, girls, as soon as they hit a success? Why must they go trucking all over the world and slaver with delight at wars?" In this conversation with interviewer Robert Van Gelner, Benson did not specify which novelists she was indicting, but she did exclude William Faulkner and W. Somerset Maugham from the blanket criticism.

As for Benson's own work, her stories have been characterized as pithy, concise, ruthless satire, "revealing the mediocrity of self-deluded and self-indulgent characters, " and "exposing a society which fosters useless lives by its role expectations, " yet with a warmth and compassion that tempers the sharp edges. A rapid writer (her first draft was her final draft), Benson wrote many of her stories in less than three hours. Her first short-story collection, People Are Fascinating, was published in 1936, followed by Emily in 1938. A retelling of Greek mythology, Stories of the Gods and Heroes, came out in 1940.

In 1941, her most famous group of stories, Junior Miss, about the "troubles, trials and foibles" of twelve-year-old Judy Graves, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, acclaimed as a fine example of a young girl's "rites of passage" and recommended for young readers everywhere. Yet the book is filled with the wry anguish of growing up and despite its title is a rewarding work to read for adults. It was dramatized for Broadway by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields and later became a national radio series, with scripts written by Benson. Subsequently, Junior Miss was also made into a movie and a television musical.

Meet Me in St. Louis, a selection of stories that appeared in the New Yorker as "5135 Kensington, " was based on Benson's sister's diary about family life in St. Louis at the time of the World's Fair in 1904. These largely autobiographical sketches were picked up by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to be made into a charming musical box-office hit starring Judy Garland. While Benson was at the studio working on the screen treatment, she assembled the stories into novel form, and the book was published in 1942, followed quickly by Shadow of a Doubt (1942) and Women and Children First (1943).

Following the success of Meet Me in St. Louis, Benson wrote scripts for a number of films. Her playwrighting credits include Seventeen (adapted from the novel by Booth Tarkington, 1954) and The Young and the Beautiful (based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Josephine" stories in the Saturday Evening Post, 1956). She also wrote scripts for television, including a "DuPont Show of the Month" episode in 1957 and an adaptation of Hans Brinker for "Hallmark Hall of Fame. " Benson died in Woodland Hills, California.

Achievements

• Sally Benson was a well-known author of her time. She wrote interview articles and film reviews for the New York Morning Telegraph and published 99 stories in The New Yorker. Her stories "The Overcoat" and "Suite 2049" were selected as O. Henry prize stories for 1935 and 1936. Most of Benson's short stories are put in collections: People Are Fascinating (1936); Emily (1938); Stories Of The Gods And Heroes (1940); Junior Miss (1941); Meet Me in St. Louis (1942); Women and Children First (1943). Benson also wrote scripts for a number of films, including: Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Experiment Perilous (1944), National Velvet (1944), Anna and the King of Siam (1946), Come to the Stable (1949), No Man of Her Own (1950), Conspirator (1950), The Belle of New York (1952), The Farmer Takes a Wife (1953), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960), Bus Stop (1961), Summer Magic (1962), Viva Las Vegas (1963), Signpost to Murder (1963), and The Singing Nun (1966). Her screenplay for Anna and the King of Siam was nominated for an Academy Award in 1946.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Stories of Gods and Heroes

    (Over twenty tales from the mythology of the Greeks and Ro...)

  • Meet Me in St. Louis

    (The heart-warming saga of St. Louis' gay, glittering Worl...)

  • Woman and Children First

  • book

  • People are fascinating

Connections

At age nineteen, Sally met and married Reynolds Benson, athletics manager at Columbia University. They had one child and were later divorced.

Father:

Alonzo Redway Smith

He was a cotton broker.

Mother:

Anna (Prophater) Smith

Daughter:

Barbara (Benson) Golseth

husband:

Reynolds Benson

He was athletics manager at Columbia University.