Ben Ames Williams

Biography

American short-story writer and novelist Ben Ames Williams was born in Macon, Mississippi, in 1889. Shortly afterwards his father, a newspaperman, bought the "Jackson Standard Journal" in Jackson, Ohio, and the family moved there. Williams grew up in the newspaper business, and while in high school he worked at the paper, starting at the bottom and eventually working his way up to writing and editing. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1910 and was offered a job teaching at a boys school in Connecticut, but instead took a position as a reporter for the "Boston American" newspaper. His first love was writing fiction, however, and each day after work he would go home and work on his writing. In 1915 he had his first story published, "Deep Stuff", in a publication called "The Popular Magazine". In 1917 he had a story, "The Mate of the Susie Oakes", published in "The Saturday Evening Post" magazine, a publication that over the next quarter-century would publish almost 200 of his stories. Many of them--more than 125--were set in the fictional town of Fraternity, Maine (be owned a summer home in rural Maine and loved the area) and they were wildly popular with readers. Williams is probably best known for the film adaptations of his novels, such as Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and All the Brothers Were Valiant (1953). He died of a heart attack in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1953.