Upcoming Library Lecture Series: Maryellen Keefe, PhD, Tuesday, October 21st, 2014 @ 13:30

Library Lecture Series, Celebrating 140th Anniversary of Maritime College presents:

Casual Affairs: The Life and Fiction of Sally Benson 

With Author Sister Maryellen Keefe, PhD Associate Professor of English at SUNY Maritime

Tuesday, October 21st, 2014 @ 13:30, Stephen B. Luce Library

Sister Maryellen Keefe entered the classroom as an Ursuline nun, teaching at various East coast academies before ultimately pursuing her doctorate in English Literature at the University of Delaware. A New York City native, Dr. Keefe has never been one to follow a traditional path while fulfilling dual roles as both a sister and faculty member of the Humanities department at SUNY Maritime College. In addition to receiving numerous National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, she is advisor of the Newman Club, a Catholic ministry organization, and serves on the Faculty Senate. Outside of her tireless work in and out of the college, Keefe is a published and highly praised author of both children’s and adult nonfiction titles. 

Dr. Maryellen Keefe’s new book Casual Affairs: The Life and Fiction of Sally Benson is Casual Affairs: The Life and Fiction of Sally Benson is a critical biography of the New Yorker writer whose stories were retold in the well-known film and musical Meet Me In St. Louis. Keefe’s vivid retelling of Benson’s life traces her feats and successes as she navigated the delicate balance between family life as a wife and mother and her role as a career woman, while indulging in several “quiet little affairs.” Drawing on family papers and interviews with Benson’s family members, Keefe’s meticulously researched biography presents us with a portrait of an honest and masterful storyteller who, like her contemporary, Dorothy Parker, is full of wit in her deprecating portrayals of middle class Americans from the Jazz Age well into the 1940s.

“Finally a biographer capable of bringing the brilliant and outrageous Sally Benson to life! And what a life it was for a woman, who began a long career writing for the New Yorker in 1929 and Hollywood in the forties. Keefe’s vivid account…is also the story of a generation of young women eager to balance work and family.” —Susan Goodman, author of Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857–1925