Sally Benson (1897–1972)

Sally Benson was born Sara Smith in St. Louis, Missouri. Her family moved to New York, where she grew up and attended the Horace Mann School. She studied dance and started working at age 17. Two years later, she married Reynolds Benson, with whom she had a daughter; the couple then divorced. She began her literary career writing articles and film reviews for newspapers and magazines, including interviews with the rich and famous. Between 1929 and 1941, she wrote for The New Yorker, sometimes using the pen name Esther Evarts. Her short stories "The Overcoat" (1935) and "Suite 2049" (1936) won O. Henry Awards. In 1936, she published her first collection of stories, People Are Fascinating, followed by a further collection, Emily (1938). She also wrote a popular series of stories about Judy Graves, a gauche adolescent girl, which were collected in book form under the title Junior Miss (1941). Junior Miss was adapted by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields into a comedic play for Broadway. A movie version was released in 1945, followed by a television musical and a radio series.
Benson's most famous work was Meet Me in St. Louis (1942), derived from a series of vignettes first published in The New Yorker under the title 5135 Kensington Avenue, the address of her birth and early childhood. Benson worked on the screenplay for the film adaptation starring Judy Garland made by MGM in 1944, but her draft was never used; however, she was credited as the original author. Her more successful script writing efforts included Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Anna and the King of Siam (1946), No Man of Her Own (1950), Viva Las Vegas (1964), and The Singing Nun (1966). Benson also adapted the novel Seventeen by Booth Tarkington into a successful Broadway musical in 1951.