author

Hetty Hemenway

1890–1961

A Boston-born writer remembered for a slim, emotionally charged World War I novel, she captured the speed and strain of love in wartime. Her best-known book, Four Days, first appeared in 1917 and has stayed in circulation through public-domain and reprint editions.

1 Audiobook

Four Days: The Story of a War Marriage

Four Days: The Story of a War Marriage

by Hetty Hemenway

About the author

Born in Boston in 1890, Hetty Lawrence Hemenway later married Edwin Auguste Richard II in August 1917. Genealogical records place her life between Boston and New York, and record her death in Manhattan in December 1961.

As an author, she is best known for Four Days: The Story of a War Marriage, published by Little, Brown and Company in 1917. Library and public-domain records consistently identify it as her signature work, and Project Gutenberg lists that novel as the only title under her name, also noting the alias Hetty Lawrence Richard.

Very little widely documented biographical material about her seems to survive online, so her published fiction remains the clearest window into her career. What does come through is a writer closely associated with an early 20th-century wartime love story that has continued to find readers long after its first publication.