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Sally Benson was born in St. Louis on September 3, 1897. Her family relocated to New York, where she grew up and attended the Horace Mann School. At seventeen, she began her career at the National City Bank, "singing into a dictaphone," as she later described. After several years and a divorce, she started writing magazine reviews and conducting interviews with prominent figures. This marked the start of her writing career. In 1930, using the pen name Esther Evarts, she submitted a short story to The New Yorker, which led to further requests from the editors. Her most popular work was a series of stories about Judy Graves, a clumsy teenage protagonist, titled "Junior Miss." These stories were compiled into a 1941 Book of the Month selection and adapted into a Broadway comedy by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields. The stories also inspired a 1945 film, a TV musical, and a radio series.
Benson's best-known work is Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), based on nostalgic vignettes about a St. Louis family from 1903 to 1904, drawing on her own childhood memories. These were published in The New Yorker as 5135 Kensington Avenue, named after her childhood street. Although she worked on the screenplay for the 1944 MGM film adaptation, her contributions were largely cut, resulting in her receiving credit only as the original author. However, some of her other screenwriting efforts were more successful, including collaborations on Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Shadow of a Doubt (1943), the romantic drama Anna and the King of Siam (1946), and the film noir No Man of Her Own (1950). Benson also adapted Booth Tarkington's novel Seventeen into a successful Broadway play.
In her personal life, Benson enjoyed reading, playing the harp and piano, and visiting racetracks. She passed away in July 1972 at the age of 74.
