Laura Benét
Laura Benét, 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 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.