Laura Benét

Laura Benét (13 June 1884 – 17 February 1979), was an American social worker, biographer and newspaper editor.

Life and work

Laura Benét was born at Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, New York, on 13 June 1884. Her brothers both won the Pulitzer Prize, the writer William Rose Benét and the poet Stephen Vincent Benét. She graduated from the Emma Willard School in 1903 and, four years later, from Vassar College with an A.B. degree. Benét was a settlement worker in New York City from 1913 to 1916 and then became an inspector for the Red Cross Sanitary Commission during World War I. After the war, she returned home in 1919 to help care for her brother William's three children after the death of his first wife, Theresa Thompson (sister of the novelist Kathleen Thompson Norris), during the flu pandemic. Benét occasionally wrote for the Literary Review and then began writing biographies for children and adults while working as a newspaper editor for the New York Sun and the New York Times. She mostly wrote literary biographies, including ones on both of her brothers, and also compiled biographies like Famous English and American Essayists. She wrote her memoir, When William Rose, Stephen Vincent, and I Were Young, in 1976. Benét died in New York on 17 February 1979.^[1]

Notes

References

• Scanlon, Jennifer & Cosner, Shaaron (1996). American Women Historians, 1700s–1990s: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-29664-2.