Babette Rosmond

Babette Rosmond (November 4, 1917 – October 23, 1997) was an American author.

Biography Career Rosmond sold her first short story to The New Yorker at age seventeen. She published short fiction of her own and with Leonard M. Lake. Her second novel, A Party for Grown-Ups (1948), was about an affair between a married doctor and a wealthy divorcee. Lucy, or the Delaware Dialogues (1952) was about infighting amongst the suburban Delaware family. She also wrote The Children: A Comedy for Grown-Ups (1956), The Lawyers (1962), Error Hurled (1976), and Monarch (1978). She published the satirical novel Diary of a Candid Lady (1964) under the name Francis M. Arroway.

She served as fiction editor of Today's Family (from 1952 to 1953) then worked at Better Living (from 1953 to 1956), and Seventeen (from 1957 to 1975). At Seventeen she was fiction editor and edited a series of anthologies of fiction published in the magazine: Seventeen's Stories (1958), Seventeen from Seventeen (1967), Seventeen Book of Prize Stories (1968), and Today's Stories from Seventeen (1971). brother of Louis Stone of the brokerage firm Haydn Stone, and uncle of director Oliver Stone. They would be married for the rest of her life and they had two children, one of whom is the writer Gene Stone, the other is James Stone, founder, CEO and Chairman of The Plymouth Rock Assurance Corporation.

Activism In the 1970s, Rosmond became an important early activist against traditional treatments for breast cancer. In February 1971 she found an olive-sized lump in her breast and was diagnosed with breast cancer. The traditional treatment was a radical mastectomy, which required removal of the entire breast as well as surrounding tissue, muscle, and lymph nodes. Two of her friends had that procedure and reported being unhappy with their choice and the resulting side effects.