author
Hetty Hemenway
1890–1961
A little-known early 20th-century writer, remembered for a compact World War I-era novel that turns a brief romance into an emotional wartime story. Her surviving published work suggests a gift for intimate, high-pressure scenes rather than grand spectacle.
1 Audiobook
Four days : The story of a war marriage
by Hetty Hemenway
About the author
Hetty Hemenway (1890–1961) is best known for Four Days: The Story of a War Marriage, published by Little, Brown and Company in 1917. The novel also survives through Project Gutenberg and library catalogs, which helps confirm both the title and its original publication period.
She also appeared in The Atlantic, indicating that her work reached a major American magazine audience during the World War I era. While detailed biographical information about her life is scarce in the sources available online, the record that remains points to a writer active in the 1910s whose fiction centered on love, separation, and the emotional strain of war.
Because so little has been preserved about her personal story, her reputation today rests mainly on that surviving novel. That gives her work a special kind of interest: it offers readers a direct glimpse of popular literary feeling during the First World War, through the voice of an author who has largely slipped out of view.