Ben Ames Williams
Ben Ames Williams was an American author born on March 7, 1889, in Macon, Mississippi, and raised in Jackson, Ohio. After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1910, he began his career in journalism as a reporter for the Boston American, later transitioning to fiction writing in 1916. Over his prolific career, Williams authored more than four hundred short stories and over thirty novels, with a significant number of his stories appearing in prestigious publications like the Saturday Evening Post. His works often explored historical themes, particularly focusing on the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, with his best-known novel being "Leave Her to Heaven," published in 1944. Many of his narratives were set in the fictional town of Fraternity, Maine, reflecting his family’s summer home in the area. Williams's writing was influenced by notable literary figures of the nineteenth century, and while he enjoyed considerable fame during his lifetime, his legacy has waned in contemporary recognition. His contributions to American literature, however, remain an important part of early 20th-century fiction.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Ben Ames Williams
Writer
- Born: March 7, 1889
- Birthplace: Macon, Mississippi
- Died: February 4, 1953
- Place of death: Brookline, Massachusetts
Biography
Ben Ames Williams was born on March 7, 1889, in Macon, Mississippi, and grew up in Jackson, Ohio, where his father was the editor of the weekly Jackson Standard-Journal. After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1910, Williams became a reporter for the Boston American. In 1912, he married Florence Trafton Talpey, of York, Maine, with whom he had three children. He remained at the Boston American until 1916, when he left journalism to become a professional fiction writer.
His first story was “The Wings of Lias,” which he published in Smith’s Magazine in July, 1915. Over the next thirty years, he would write more than four hundred short stories, with 135 of them appearing in the Saturday Evening Post, one the best markets for short fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Williams also published more than thirty books, many of them historical novels, especially about the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. One of his first Post stories, “They Grind Exceedingly Small,” was selected for the first O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories, an annual launched in 1919, and a number of his later stories were also collected in anthologies or turned into novels.
His first novel, All the Brothers Were Valiant, was also published in 1919 and was one of several of Williams’s books that was adapted into a motion picture. His most popular novel was Leave Her to Heaven (1944) and his other well- known novels include The Strange Woman (1941), House Divided (1947), Owen Glen (1950), and The Unconquered (1953). More than 125 of his stories were set in the fictional town of Fraternity, Maine (he and his family had a summer home near the rural town of Searsmont, Maine), and it was the Fraternity stories, initially published in periodicals and later published in collections like Fraternity Village (1949), upon which Williams’s contemporary fame rests. Williams, whose literary models were the giants of the nineteenth century (such as Honore Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, and Robert Louis Stevenson), was one of the best-known American writers in the first half of the twentieth century, a prolific short-story writer and novelist. He probably not be long remembered into the twenty-first century.