Sally Benson

Sally Benson
Sally Benson, 1941
Born	September 3, 1897 United States
Died	July 19, 1972(1972-07-19) (aged 74) United States
Occupation	Screenwriter, author
Genre	Fiction, screenwriting

Sally Benson (September 3, 1897 – July 19, 1972) was an American screenwriter, who was also a prolific short story author, best known for her semi-autobiographical stories collected in Junior Miss and Meet Me in St. Louis.

Benson, the daughter of Alonzo Redway and Anna Prophater Smith, moved with her family from her birthplace of St. Louis to New York, where she attended the Horace Mann School, studied dance and then started working when she was 17 years old. At age 19, she married Reynolds Benson. The couple had a daughter and later divorced.

She began her career writing weekly interview articles and film reviews for the New York Morning Telegraph. Between 1929 and 1941, she published 99 stories in The New Yorker, including nine signed with her pseudonym Esther Evarts.

Her stories "The Overcoat" and "Suite 2049" were selected as O. Henry prize stories for 1935 and 1936. Her collection, People are Fascinating (Covici Friede,1936) includes almost all the stories Benson had then published in The New Yorker, plus four from American Mercury. She followed with another collection, Emily (Covici Friede, 1938). Stories of the Gods and Heroes (Dial Press, 1940) was juvenile fiction adapted from Thomas Bulfinch's Age of Fable. Women and Children First was a collection published by Random House in 1943.

Junior Miss was published by Doubleday in 1941. This collection of her stories from The New Yorker was adapted by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields into a successful play that same year. Directed by Moss Hart, Junior Miss ran on Broadway from 1941 to 1943. In 1945, the play was adapted to the film Junior Miss with George Seaton directing Peggy Ann Garner in the lead role. The Junior Miss radio series, starring Barbara Whiting, was broadcast weekly on CBS in 1949.