A short life of the author
Ben Ames Williams (7 March 1889 – 4 February 1953) was an American novelist and short story writer who was one of the most popular and commercially successful American fiction writers of the first half of the twentieth century, publishing over four hundred short stories in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and other magazines, and more than thirty novels. His psychological thriller Leave Her to Heaven (1944) — a chilling portrait of a beautiful, pathologically possessive woman — was a massive bestseller and was adapted into a celebrated 1945 film that became the highest-grossing Twentieth Century-Fox film of that year. His Civil War novel House Divided (1947), at over 1,500 pages, was among the longest American novels ever published.
Life
Williams was born in Macon, Mississippi, and grew up in Jackson, Ohio. He attended Dartmouth College, graduating in 1910, and then worked as a reporter for the Boston American. He began selling short stories to pulp and slick magazines in 1915 and quickly became one of the most prolific contributors to The Saturday Evening Post, which published over a hundred of his stories. He lived in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and spent summers in Searsmont, Maine — the Maine landscape became the setting for several of his novels.
He was an enormously productive writer — during the 1920s and 1930s, he published three or four stories a month — and his income from magazine fiction alone was substantial. He also wrote screenplays and served as a president of the Authors Guild.
Leave Her to Heaven (1944)
Williams’s most famous novel tells the story of Ellen Berent, a woman of extraordinary beauty and equally extraordinary possessiveness. Ellen marries Richard Harland, a writer, and systematically destroys everything that competes for his attention — including his disabled younger brother (whom she drowns in a lake while feigning helplessness), their unborn child (she throws herself down a staircase), and ultimately herself. The novel is a study of pathological narcissism rendered with clinical precision and the calm surface of a domestic romance.
The 1945 film adaptation, directed by John M. Stahl, starred Gene Tierney as Ellen in one of the great performances of the studio era. The film was notable for being shot in Technicolor — unusual for a noir/thriller — which gave the beautiful Maine landscapes and Ellen’s gorgeous wardrobe an uncanny brightness that made the darkness of the story more disturbing. The drowning scene — shot in a still lake with Tierney watching through sunglasses as the boy struggles — is one of the most chilling sequences in American cinema.
House Divided (1947)
Williams’s Civil War epic follows the Currain family of Virginia from the 1850s through Reconstruction. At approximately 1,500 pages, it is one of the longest American novels and was clearly intended as Williams’s bid for literary permanence — his answer to War and Peace and Gone with the Wind. The novel was a bestseller but was judged by critics as sprawling and underdisciplined. A sequel, The Unconquered (1953), was published shortly before Williams’s death.
Other Work
All the Brothers Were Valiant (1919) — his first successful novel — is a seafaring adventure about two brothers in the New England whaling trade. It was filmed twice (1923 and 1953). The Strange Woman (1941) — another psychological study of a destructive woman, set in nineteenth-century Maine — was adapted into a 1946 film starring Hedy Lamarr.
Williams also edited A Diary from Dixie (1949), the journals of Mary Boykin Chesnut, which became one of the primary sources for understanding the Confederate civilian experience during the Civil War.
Critical Standing
Williams was enormously popular during his lifetime but has been almost completely forgotten. He belongs to the tradition of American popular novelists — Lloyd C. Douglas, Kenneth Roberts, Thomas Costain — who sold millions of books, were adapted into major films, and then vanished from literary history because their work lacked the formal ambition that sustains critical reputation. Leave Her to Heaven, however, deserves better: its portrait of destructive beauty is genuinely disturbing, and the film has kept the story in cultural circulation.
Collecting Williams
Leave Her to Heaven (1944, Houghton Mifflin) in first edition with dust jacket brings $50–$200. House Divided (1947) brings $20–$60. All the Brothers Were Valiant (1919) brings $30–$80. Williams’s books are not widely collected, and prices remain modest.