Based on Sally Benson's New Yorker stories, Meet Me In St. Louis has a good deal more substance and character than most musicals. It is the story of the well-heeled Smith family during the summer, fall, and winter of 1903 and, more particularly, of the four Smith Sisters.

• Rose, the eldest, is merely waiting for a proposal, which at length she gets.
• Esther is tremulously interested in the shy basketball player next door (John).
• Agnes is still chiefly interested in things like swimming and hunting knives.
• Tootie has a passion for letting her dolls die off so that she can bury them in the backyard.

Tragedy, of a gentle sort, threatens the Smiths when their father accepts a business promotion which means their permanent removal to New York. As the story develops, they realize with considerable poignancy just how cherishable the spacious and innocent securities of early 20th-century life in a good provincial city could be.

Time Magazine, Nov. 27, 1944