Jean Webster was the pen name of Alice Jane Chandler Webster (1876-1916) who was born and lived most of her life in New York State. She was the great-niece of Mark Twain. Daddy-Long-Legs was not her first book, but it is the one for which she is mostly remembered. It was published in 1912, followed by a sequel in 1914 called Dear Enemy. She married in 1915 and tragically died in childbirth a year later.