Benedict Freedman Books in Order

Benedict Freedman was born in New York City in 1919 and grew up in a home where writing and music were part of daily life. His father, David Freedman, wrote for radio and Broadway, and his mother, Beatrice, was a violinist. Benedict moved fast through school, finished Townsend Harris young, and entered Columbia University when he was just 13.

His early start did not mean an easy path.

When his father died, Freedman left Columbia at 16 to help support the family. He turned to writing partly out of necessity and partly because it was already the family trade. Before long he was writing comedy for radio performers such as Red Skelton, and by 1940 he was working at MGM on the West Coast.

Around that time he met Nancy Mars, an aspiring actress who would become his wife and his closest collaborator. They married in 1941 and kept writing together for decades. During World War II, Freedman also worked as a stress analyst for Hughes Aircraft, then returned to entertainment writing, with later television credits that included My Favorite Martian.

Their best-known book, Mrs. Mike, came out in 1947. Inspired by the stories of Katherine Mary Flannigan, it tells of a young woman from Boston who marries a Mountie and builds a life in the Canadian North. The book became a bestseller, was adapted for film, and never really disappeared from readers' hands. Part of its staying power is simple: a strong love story, a vivid setting, and an honest sense that hard lives are still lived one day at a time.

Freedman and Nancy kept returning to women trying to make room for themselves inside difficult worlds. In The Search for Joyful and Kathy Little Bird, they followed later generations from the orbit of Mrs. Mike, bringing in war, prejudice, music, family ties, and the question of what home really means. Other books, like Lootville and Cyclone of Silence, show different sides of the partnership, one turned toward show business, the other rooted in family memory.

He liked people at turning points.

That fits his own life, because writing was only one of his careers. In his late 40s he went back to school at UCLA to study mathematics, earned a bachelor's degree in 1968 and a doctorate in 1970, and then joined the faculty at Occidental College. He taught mathematics there until 1995 and also helped lead the college's general studies program. It is not every novelist who decides to become a professor of symbolic logic in middle age, but for Freedman it seems to have been less a reinvention than a return to an old interest.

He kept working late into life. Rescuing the Future was his big book of political philosophy, and Us looked back on his life with Nancy, their courtship, and the partnership behind their books. Even the story of Mrs. Mike says something about how they worked together: they could not afford a research trip to Canada, so much of the groundwork was done in a library, then turned into a novel that felt lived in.

In his later years he lived in Northern California near family, after retiring from Occidental. He died in 2012 at age 92. Readers coming to him now will find more than one version of Benedict Freedman on the shelf, novelist, screenwriter, teacher, thinker, and collaborator. The connecting thread is a steady curiosity about how people build a life, and then build another one when the first plan falls apart.