Early Life and Career
Benson, the daughter of Alonzo Redway and Anna Prophater Smith, moved with her family from 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.
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