(April 30, 1898 – September 11, 1968)

Born in Neligh, Nebraska as Lucille Christy Bennett, she was raised in Yankton, South Dakota, where her father was a prominent progressive newspaperman and mayor. She attended Yankton College and later the University of Colorado and the University of Southern California. After marrying Fred Eberhart in 1919 and moving to Colorado circa 1924, she worked for the Rocky Mountain News as a columnist, woman’s editor and feature writer. “I consider newspaper writing the best training possible for fiction writing,” she later said. Lucille later re-married, to Mr. Carl Haberl, whom she considered her best critic as a writer.

Signing herself “Eve” Bennett, she published five novels and a number of short stories which appeared in such publications as The Saturday Evening Post, Woman’s Day, Good Housekeeping and Toronto Star. Her novels focus primarily on young people, and she was well placed to write about such things. The mother of six children whose lives and times provided some of the material for her novels, she was also later grandmother to seventeen, plus a number of semi-surrogate grandchildren whom she considered her own. All these young people gave her a unique knack for recreating the moods of the young with a vividness and compassion born of deep understanding. “I am actually on the side of the young people most of the time in their problems,” she said. “It seems to me they are doing a good job of trying to learn to be responsible and intelligent in a world they never made.”

Eve Bennett was a champion of progressive politics. With deep religious convictions and a fighters’ will, she took on a wide range of social and political issues, regularly writing letters to the editor of local newspapers.

 

Books (all out of print, though available at Amazon and other used book sellers)

I, Judy

Concerning Casey

Walk in the Moonlight

April Wedding

Little Bit