Laura Benét

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

Early life and education Laura Benét was born at Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, New York, on June 13, 1884. Her brothers, the writer William Rose Benét and the poet Stephen Vincent Benét, both won the Pulitzer Prize. She graduated from the Emma Willard School in 1903 and, four years later, from Vassar College with an A.B. degree.

Career 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, Teresa Thompson, sister of the novelist Kathleen Thompson Norris, during the 1918 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.

Death Benét died in New York on February 17, 1979. She is buried at Arlington National Cemetery with her parents, U.S. Army Colonel James Walker Benét (1857-1928) and Frances Neill Rose Benét (1860-1940).

Selected works Fairy Bread, 1921 Noah's Dove, 1929 Goods And Chattels, 1930 The Guinea Pig, 1930 Basket for a Fair, 1934 The Boy Shelley, 1937 Caleb's Luck, 1938 The Hidden Valley, 1938 Enchanting Jenny Lind, 1939 Roxana Rampant, 1940 Young Edgar Allan Poe, 1941 Come Slowly, Eden, 1942 Washington Irving: Explorer of American Legend, 1944 Is Morning Sure?, 1947 Thackeray of the Great Heart and Humorous Pen, 1947 Barnum's First Circus and Other Stories, 1949 Famous American Poets, 1950 Coleridge: Poet of Wild Enchantment, 1952 Stanley: Invincible Explorer, 1955 In Love With Time: Poems, 1959 Famous American Humorists, 1959 Famous Poets for Young People, 1964 Horseshoe Nails, 1965 Famous English and American Essayists, 1966 Famous Biographies for Young People, 1966 Washington Irving: Explorer Of American Legend, 1966 Famous New England Authors, 1970 The Mystery of Emily Dickinson, 1973 Bridge of a Single Hair: A Book of Poems, 1974 When William Rose, Stephen Vincent, and I Were Young, 1976