Lura Beam

Lura Ella Beam (April 1, 1887–May 1978) was an American educator, writer, and researcher. Her interests included the poor, minorities, women, education, and the arts. She co-authored two books discussing medical studies on sex adjustment and sex education with Robert Latou Dickinson, and a noted memoir of growing up in turn-of-the-century Marshfield, Maine. She was the long-time companion of Louise Stevens Bryant.

Early life and education Lura Beam was born in Marshfield, Maine, in 1887. After graduating from the area high school in 1904, she attended the University of California at Berkeley for two years before transferring to Barnard College. She went on to work for other non-profit institutions such as the Association of American Colleges and Universities (1919–1926), the National Committee on Maternal Health (1927–1933), the General Education Board in New York City, the Interchurch World Movement, and the American Association of University Women (1937–1952).

As head of the arts department of the American Association of University Women in the 1940s, Beam helped assemble a series of traveling art exhibitions that circulated among AAUW branches. These exhibits, attended by more than 770,000 viewers, presented "artwork based on themes such as the artwork of Colorado or Mexican children, trends in American painting, and African sculpture", as well as modern art and reproductions by Picasso, Matisse, Klee, and Roualt.

Beam retired in 1952 but continued to write and organize art exhibitions; she also assembled research on aging and retirement.

Beam is best known in her home state for her 1957 work A Maine Hamlet, which one review called "the book that a generation of readers treasured as the most perceptive account of traditional life in Maine ever written". Beam wrote vividly about growing up with her grandparents in Marshfield, Maine, at the turn of the century, describing the residents, institutions, lifestyle and community tenets. Later, both women worked for the Committee on Maternal Health. Bryant was the one who encouraged Beam to write her memories of small-town life in her book A Maine Hamlet (1957). After Bryant's death in 1957, Beam prepared her biography in the work Bequest from a Life: A biography of Louise Stevens Bryant (1963).

Selected bibliography Beam's works include: , republished 1970 (with Robert Latou Dickinson) , republished in 1987 (with Robert Latou Dickinson)

, republished in the mid-1980s and in 2000