A trustee of the John Grier orphanage has offered to send Judy Abbott to college. The only requirements are that she must write to him every month and that she can never know who he is. Judy's life at college is a whirlwind of friends, classes, parties and a growing friendship with the handsome Jervis Pendleton. With so much happening in her life, Judy can scarcely stop writing to 'Daddy-Long-Legs', or wondering who her mysterious benefactor is . . .

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.