Jean Webster

Jean Webster (1876–1916) was born Alice Jane Chandler Webster in Fredonia, New York, a grand-niece of Mark Twain on her father's side. She attended Vassar College, where she studied economics and English, edited the college magazine, and began publishing stories; visits to a local orphan asylum and a state reformatory as part of her coursework left a lasting impression that surfaced later in her fiction. After graduating in 1901 she wrote steadily — When Patty Went to College (1903) and several further Patty books came first — before Daddy-Long-Legs (1912) became her best-known work; she adapted it herself for the stage the same year, and followed it with a sequel, Dear Enemy (1915), about the same orphanage under new management. She married Glenn Ford McKinney in 1915 and died the following year, at thirty-nine, from complications of childbirth, shortly after the birth of her only child.