author
Helen Hayes Gleason
A little-known American writer and Red Cross worker, she helped turn the upheaval of World War I into vivid, human stories. Her work carries the immediacy of someone who saw war up close and wanted readers to feel its cost.
1 Audiobook
Golden Lads
by Arthur Gleason, Helen Hayes Gleason
About the author
Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1885, Helen Hayes Gleason was a pianist as well as a writer. During World War I she worked with the American Red Cross in San Diego and, according to her memorial record, also drove for the Red Cross during the war.
She is best known as the co-author of Golden Lads (1916), written with Arthur Gleason. The book is a firsthand World War I account centered on Belgium and the young people caught in the violence of the conflict, and it remains the work most closely associated with her.
Gleason died in 1973. Though she is not widely remembered today, her writing preserves a personal, ground-level view of wartime experience that still gives her work its emotional pull.