Jean Webster

Jean Webster (1876–1916) was an American novelist, born Alice Jane Chandler Webster in Fredonia, New York, a grand-niece of Mark Twain, whose publishing business her father ran. At Vassar College she studied economics and visited orphanages and reform institutions, experiences that shaped her fiction. Her college stories, When Patty Went to College (1903) and Just Patty, were followed by the epistolary novel Daddy-Long-Legs (1912), which she also adapted into a successful play, and its sequel Dear Enemy (1915). She campaigned for the reform of orphan asylums and for prison reform, and died at forty of complications following the birth of her daughter.