Helen Hayes Gleason

Helen Hayes Gleason was an American writer and journalist best known for books she wrote with her husband, Arthur Gleason, including Golden Lads. In that book, the authors describe their experiences in wartime Belgium during 1914 and 1915, drawing on what they saw while working close to the fighting.

The surviving record suggests that her time in Belgium was not just observational. In the book's opening pages, Arthur Gleason says his wife's experience there lasted about twelve months, while he spent five months at the front, which points to her unusually direct involvement in relief and war-zone work for a writer of the period.

Today she is remembered mainly through those firsthand accounts, which give readers an immediate sense of civilian suffering, military life, and the moral urgency that shaped much World War I reporting.