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《戰爭與統帥》《古代軍隊記錄》《羅馬帝國的生活》，是引起強有力的普利策奬史詩《約翰·布朗的遺體》作者興趣的最初部分書籍；早年，斯蒂芬·文森特·貝尼特（Stephen Vincent Benet，1898—1943）在駐防全國各地的軍隊裏長大，當他的父親、美軍陸軍上校詹姆斯·沃爾剋·貝內特，背誦諸如布朗的詩行時，這個什麽都讀的幼小讀者便專註地傾聽着：“我、喬裏斯和他跳上馬鐙，/我飛奔，剋裏剋飛奔，我們三個都飛奔。”
貝內特傢在西班牙（米諾卡島）和美國世世代代都是軍人。陸軍准將斯蒂芬·文森特·貝尼特，詩人的爺爺，是美國軍隊軍械署署長，首席大法官福爾摩斯曾經說：“我讀的第一本署此姓名的書是一本《軍法專著》，第二本，很多年後，是一本史詩！”
斯蒂芬·文森特·貝尼特像他著名的姊妹威廉·露絲·貝尼特和勞拉·貝尼特一樣，在很小時就開始寫作。他12歲時他的詩集在聖尼古拉斯聯盟出版。17歲時他的戲劇獨白的書《五個男人和龐培》問世。當他仍在耶魯時，第二本書就出版了。威廉·裏昂·菲爾普斯，他在耶魯的一位老師，描述他是一個受到普遍歡迎、容光煥發的健談者。他是《青春》的一位副主編，這是一本校際詩刊，主張“死亡使詩歌自由”；他是耶魯文學雜志的主席，獲得過三個詩歌奬；他的耶魯朋友裏包括菲利普·巴裏、阿奇博爾德·麥剋利什和桑頓·王爾德。
從耶魯畢業後，他嘗試從事廣告業，寫了一部小說，獲得文學碩士學位後去了法國，在巴黎大學文理學院學習，並繼續他的創作。1926年他被授予古根海姆學者奬，他再次去了法國，為寫《約翰·布朗的遺體》忙碌了兩年。他後來的著作《無頭騎士》，一部廣播輕歌劇，主要圍繞着美國的民間傳說來創作；《戴維和丹尼爾·韋伯斯特》，他最著名的故事，改編成歌劇並在紐約演出；還有《約翰尼·派伊和傻瓜殺手》。除了普利策奬，他還贏得國傢詩歌奬，羅斯福勳章（為表彰他對美國文學的貢獻），以及雪萊紀念奬。他是全國藝術和文學學會的副主席、《耶魯青年詩人叢書》的編者。據說他是本·文森特——西裏爾·休謨寫於1923年的書《半人馬座的妻子》中的一個人物——的原型。他有三個孩子，生活在紐約。
他的作品有：《五個男人和龐培》（1915），《青春冒險》（1918），《天堂與大地》（1920），《老虎喬伊》（1925），《絲蘭》（1926），《約翰·布朗的遺體》（1928，1929年普利策奬），《民歌與詩歌》（1931），《詹姆斯·肖氏的女兒》（1934），《燃燒的城市》（1936），《戴維和丹尼爾·韋伯斯特》（1937），《十三點》（1937），《約翰尼·派伊和傻瓜殺手》（1938），《午夜之前的傳說》（1939）。
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