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Stephen Vincent Benét (/bəˈneɪ/ bə-NAY; July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943) was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. He is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown's Body (1928), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and for the short stories "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1936) and "By the Waters of Babylon" (1937). In 2009, Library of America selected his story "The King of the Cats" (1929) for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub.
Life and career
Early life
Benét was born on July 22, 1898 in Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania to James Walker Benét, a colonel in the United States Army. His grandfather and namesake led the Army Ordnance Corps from 1874 to 1891 as a brigadier general and served in the Civil War. His paternal uncle Laurence Vincent Benét was an ensign in the United States Navy during the Spanish–American War and later manufactured the French Hotchkiss machine gun.
Around the age of ten, Benét was sent to the Hitchcock Military Academy. He graduated from Summerville Academy in Augusta, Georgia and from Yale University, where he was "the power behind the Yale Lit", according to Thornton Wilder, a fellow member of the Elizabethan Club. He also edited and contributed light verse to the campus humor magazine The Yale Record. His first book was published when he was aged 17 and he was awarded an M.A. in English upon submission of his third volume of poetry in lieu of a thesis. He was also a part-time contributor to Time magazine in its early years.
In 1920-21, Benét went to France on a Yale traveling fellowship, where he met Rosemary Carr; the couple married in Chicago in November 1921. Carr was also a writer and poet, and they collaborated on some works. In 1926, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship award and while living in Paris, wrote John Brown's Body.
Man of letters
They came here, they toiled here, they suffered many pains, they lived here, they died here, they left singing names.
— Used by the Menorcan Cultural Society to honor their Minorcan ancestors who fled Andrew Turnbull's failed New Smyrna, Florida colony and found sanctuary in St. Augustine, Florida (though Benet actually wrote those lines in a poem about the French pioneers of America).
Benét helped solidify the place of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and Yale University Press during his decade-long judgeship of the competition. He published the first volumes of James Agee, Muriel Rukeyser, Jeremy Ingalls, and Margaret Walker. He was elected a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1929, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1931.
Out of John Brown's strong sinews the tall skyscrapers grow,
Out of his heart the chanting buildings rise,
Rivet and girder, motor and dynamo,
Pillar of smoke by day and fire by night,
The steel-faced cities reaching at the skies,
The whole enormous and rotating cage
Hung with hard jewels of electric light,
Smoky with sorrow, black with splendor, dyed
Whiter than damask for a crystal bride
With metal suns, the engine-handed Age,
The genie we have raised to rule the earth,
Obsequious to our will
But servant-master still,
The tireless serf already half a god --
—Stephen Vincent Benét, "John Brown's Body" (1928)
Benét won the O. Henry Award on three occasions, for his short stories An End to Dreams in 1932, The Devil and Daniel Webster in 1937, and Freedom's a Hard-Bought Thing in 1940.
His fantasy short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" inspired several unauthorized dramatizations by other writers after its initial publication which prompted Benet to adapt his own work for the stage. Benet approached composer Douglas Moore to create an opera of the work with Benet serving as librettist in 1937. The Devil and Daniel Webster: An Opera in One Act (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939) premiered on Broadway in 1939. That work was created from 1937 through 1939, and its libretto served as the basis for a 1938 play adaptation of the work by Benet (The Devil and Daniel Webster: A Play in One Act, New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1938). The play in turn was used as the source for a screenplay adaptation co-penned by Benet which was originally released as All That Money Can Buy (1941).
Benét also wrote the sequel "Daniel Webster and the Sea Serpent", in which Daniel Webster encounters Leviathan.
Death and legacy
Benét's gravesite at Evergreen Cemetery in Stonington, Connecticut
Benét died of a heart attack in New York City on March 13, 1943 at age 44. He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Stonington, Connecticut, where he had owned the historic Amos Palmer House. On April 17, 1943, NBC broadcast a special tribute to his life and works which included a performance by Helen Hayes. He was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for Western Star, an unfinished narrative poem on the settling of the United States.
Benét adapted the Roman myth of the rape of the Sabine Women into the story "The Sobbin' Women". That story was adapted as the musical film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), then as a stage musical (1978) and then TV series (1982). His play John Brown's Body was staged on Broadway in 1953 in a three-person dramatic reading featuring Tyrone Power, Judith Anderson, and Raymond Massey, directed by Charles Laughton. The book was included in Life magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–44.
Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee takes its title from the final phrase of Benét's poem "American Names". The full quotation appears at the beginning of Brown's book:
I shall not be there
I shall rise and pass
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
Selected works
Five Men and Pompey, a series of dramatic portraits, Poetry, 1915
The Drug-Shop, or, Endymion in Edmonstoun (Yale University Prize Poem), 1917
Young Adventure: A book of Poems, 1918
Heavens and Earth, 1920
The Beginnings of Wisdom: A Novel, 1921
Young People's Pride: A Novel, 1922
Jean Huguenot: A Novel, 1923
The Ballad of William Sycamore: A Poem, 1923
King David: A two-hundred-line ballad in six parts, 1923
Nerves, 1924 (A play, with John Farrar)
That Awful Mrs. Eaton, 1924 (A play, with John Farrar)
Tiger Joy: A Book of Poems, 1925
The Mountain Whippoorwill: How Hill-Billy Jim Won the Great Fiddler's Prize: A Poem., 1925
The Bat, 1926 (ghostwritten novelization of the play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood)
Spanish Bayonet, 1926
John Brown's Body, 1928
The Barefoot Saint: A Short Story, 1929
The Litter of Rose Leaves: A Short Story, 1930
Abraham Lincoln, 1930 (screenplay with Gerrit Lloyd)
Ballads and Poems, 1915–1930, 1931
A Book of Americans, 1933 (with Rosemary Carr Benét, his wife)
James Shore's Daughter: A Novel, 1934
The Burning City, 1936 (includes 'Litany for Dictatorships')
The Magic of Poetry and the Poet's Art, 1936
The Devil and Daniel Webster, 1936
By the Waters of Babylon, 1937
The Headless Horseman: one-act play, 1937
Thirteen O'Clock, 1937
We Aren't Superstitious, 1937 (Essay on the Salem Witch Trials)
Johnny Pye and the Fool Killer: A Short Story, 1938
Tales Before Midnight: Collection of Short Stories, 1939
The Ballad of the Duke's Mercy, 1939
The Devil and Daniel Webster, 1939 (opera libretto with Douglas Moore)
A Song of Three Soldiers, 1940
Elementals, 1940–41 (broadcast)
Freedom's Hard-Bought Thing, 1941 (broadcast)
Listen to the People, 1941
A Summons to the Free, 1941
William Riley and the Fates, 1941
Cheers for Miss Bishop, 1941 (screenplay with Adelaide Heilbron, Sheridan Gibney)
The Devil and Daniel Webster, 1941 (screenplay with Dan Totheroh)
Selected Works, 1942 (2 vols.)
Short Stories, 1942
Nightmare at Noon: Short Poem, 1942 (in The Treasury Star Parade, ed. by William A. Bacher)
A Child is Born, 1942 (broadcast)
They Burned the Books, 1942
They Burned the Books, 1942 (broadcast)
These works were published posthumously:
Western Star, 1943 (unfinished)
Twenty Five Short Stories, 1943
America, 1944
O'Halloran's Luck and Other Short Stories, 1944
We Stand United, 1945 (radio scripts)
The Bishop's Beggar, 1946
The Last Circle, 1946
Selected Stories, 1947
From the Earth to the Moon, 1958