Mary Benson (campaigner) Mary Benson (campaigner) Mary Benson (8 December 1919 – 19 June 2000) was a South African civil rights campaigner and author. Born in 1919 in Pretoria, Benson served in the South African Women's Army during World War II. After the war, she was secretary to film director David Lean. Benson became acquainted with the author Alan Paton, and read his novel "Cry, the beloved country" (1948), whose main theme was racial discrimination in South Africa. This affected her greatly, and she became a campaigner for the rights of black people there. She worked with Michael Scott (who, in 1946, was
The Ides of March (novel) were worth reading ... "Cry, the Beloved Country", "The Ides of March", and "The Naked and the Dead". Wilder himself once wrote that the book was "a kind of crossword puzzle" that "only begins to speak at its second reading." Edmund Fuller called the novel "a text so rich that it requires exploration rather than reading." The novel is divided into four books, each of which starts earlier and ends later than the previous book. Catullus' poems and the closing section by Suetonius are the only documents of the book which are not imagined; however, many of the events are