Stephen Benet Biography and List of Works

American poet, novelist, and writer of short stories, best-known for JOHN BROWN'S BODY, a long epic poem on the Civil War, which Benét wrote in France. Benét's work has appealed both to mass audiences and intellectuals alike.

"American muse, whose strong and diverse heart
So many men have tried to understand
But only made it smaller with their art
Because you are as various as your land,

As mountainous - deep, as flowered with blue rivers,
Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows,
As native as the shape of Navajo quivers
And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose."
(from John Brown's Body)

Stephen Vincent Benét was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, into an army family. His father, Colonel J. Walker Benét, served as a commanding officer of ordinance posts in California and Georgia. Frances Neill (Rose) Benét, Stephen's mother, was a descendant of an old Kentucky military family. Because his father was an avid reader, Benét grew up in surroundings in which reading literature was valued and enjoyed. At the age of about ten, Benét was sent to the Hitchcock Military Academy. He did not like the brutality of the school and later wrote about it in his poem about Shelley at Eton: "His pile of books scattered about his feet, / Stood Shelley while two others held him fast, / And the clods beat upon him." Benét's first book, FIVE MEN AND POMPEY (1915), a collection of verse, was published when he was 17. It showed the romantic influence of William Morris as well as the influence of modern realism.

Benét was rejected from the army because of his defective vision. In Washington he worked as a cipher-clerk in the same department as James Thurber. Benét graduated from Yale in 1919, submitting his third volume of poems instead of a thesis. In Yale his contemporaries included Thronton Wilder and Archibald MacLeish.

Benét's first novel, the autobiographical THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM, appeared in 1921. He continued his studies at Sorbonne, France, where he met his wife, the writer Rosemary Carr. In 1923 he returned to the United States. During the 1920s he wrote three other novels, YOUNG PEOPLE'S PRIDE (1922), JEAN HUGUENOT (1923), and SPANISH BAYONET (1926), a historical novel about 18th-century Florida. It focused on Benét's Minorcan ancestors. JAMES SHORE'S DAUGHTER (1934), a story about wealth and responsibility, is usually considered among Benét's best novels.

In 1926 Benét went back to France, where he lived for four years, and worked on his poem about the Civil War, John Brown's Body. The poem won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929. Seen from the perspective of a young, small town boy, it interweaved the stories of historical and fictional figures to produce a richly textured account of the war, from the raid of Harper's Ferry to General Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House.

Before starting any new work, Benét published a collection of ballads and poems, written over a period of fifteen years. It celebrated American names and people, such as William Sycamore, whose "... father, he was a mountaineer / His fist was a knotty hammer..."

"I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin titles of mining claims,
The plumed war bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat."

In the 1930s Benét published among others A BOOK OF AMERICANS (1933) with his wife Rosemary Carr Benét. THE BURNING CITY (1936) included the poem Litany for Dictatorships. THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN (1937) was a one-act play. A short story collection, THIRTEEN O'CLOCK (1937), included the famous The Devil and Daniel Webster. The story was later made into a play, and opera (music by Douglas Moore), and a motion picture entitled All That Money Can Buy. Benét also made a number of radio broadcasts and worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter. His short stories, produced during these years, were often written under pressure to pay bills. Benét's popular poem, American Names, appeared first in BALLADS AND POEMS (1931). The poem ends with the line 'Bury my heart at Wounded Knee'.

In the early 1940s Benét was a strong advocate of America's entry into the war - in the United Nations Day speech President Roosevelt read a prayer specially composed by the author. Benét died in New York City, on March 13, 1943. He was posthumously awarded in 1944 the Pulitzer Prize for his volume of verse WESTERN STAR. The epic poem, part of large but unfinished work, reflected the view that the frontier was the dominant force in American history.

When Daniel Boone goes by, at night,
The phantom deer arise
And all lost, wild America
Is burning in their eyes.
("Daniel Boone" from A Book of Americans, 1933)

All That Money Can Buy - aka: The Devil and Daniel Webster; Daniel and the Devil; Here Is a Man - film 1941, directed by William Dieterle, starring Walter Huston, Edward Arnold, James Craig, Anne Shirley. A hard-pressed farmer gives in to the Devil's tempting, but is saved from the pit by a famous lawyer's pleading at his 'trial'. Based on Faust, set in 19th-century New Hampshire. - In the story, the Devil is Americanized as a heartlessly efficient businessman, Mr. Scratch, and the jury which he calls to hear Webster's case is composed of the greatest villains of American history. In another work, 'Johnnny Pye and the Fool-Killer', published in TALES BEFORE MIDNIGHT (1939), Benét personalized Death.

For further reading: Stephen Vincent Benét by William Rose Benét (1943); Stephen Vincent Benét: The Life and Times of an American Man of Letters, 1898-1943 by Charles A. Fenton (1958); Stephen Vincent Benét by Parry Stroud (1962); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 1) - Note: Benet's elder brother was a journalist who helped found the Saturday Review of Literature and whose verse biography won a Pulitzer Prize. William Rose Benét's The Reader's Encyclopedia is the standard American guide to world literature - See also: The Headless Horseman; Washington Irving.

Books by Stephen Benet