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Stephen Vincent Benét ( bə-NAY; July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943) was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. He wrote a book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown's Body, published in 1928, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the short stories "The Devil and Daniel Webster", published in 1936, and "By the Waters of Babylon", published in 1937.

In 2009, Library of America selected his story "The King of the Cats", published in 1929, for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub.

Early life and education

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 U.S. Army, and his wife, Frances Neill (née Rose). Benét was the brother of writers William Rose Benét and Laura Benét. 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 U.S. Navy during the Spanish–American War who later manufactured the French Hotchkiss machine gun.

Around the age of ten, Benét was sent to the Hitchcock Military Academy in San Rafael, California. He graduated at the top of his class 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. As a Yale University student, 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 the magazine's early years.

In 1920 and 1921, Benét was in 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.

Career

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.

In 1929, Benét was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Two years later, in 1931, he was awarded a fellowship by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Benét won the O. Henry Award three times for his short stories: in 1932, for An End to Dreams; in 1937, for The Devil and Daniel Webster; and in 1940, for Freedom's a Hard-Bought Thing.

His fantasy short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" inspired several unauthorized dramatizations by other writers after its publication, which prompted Benét to adapt his own work for the stage. Benét approached composer Douglas Moore to create an opera of the work with Benét serving as librettist in 1937.

The Devil and Daniel Webster: An Opera in One Act, published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1939, premiered on Broadway that same year. The opera version of Benet's "The Devil and Daniel Webster" was created from 1937 through 1939, and its libretto served as the basis for a 1938 play adaptation of the work, The Devil and Daniel Webster: A Play in One Act, published by Dramatists Play Service in 1938. The play, in turn, was used as the source for a screenplay adaptation co-written by Benét, which was released in 1941 as All That Money Can Buy.

Benét also wrote a sequel, "Daniel Webster and the Sea Serpent", in which Daniel Webster encounters Leviathan.

Death

Benét died of a heart attack in New York City on March 13, 1943, at age 44. He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Stonington, Connecticut, where he owned the historic Amos Palmer House.

Legacy

On April 17, 1943, NBC Radio 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 last two lines are used as an epigram at the beginning of Brown's book.

Selected works

Five Men and Pompey, a series of dramatic portraits, Poetry, 1915

The Drug-Shop, or, Endymion in Edmonstoun, his Yale University Prize Poem, written in 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 co-authored with John C. Farrar

That Awful Mrs. Eaton, 1924, a play co-authored with John C. 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, a screenplay co-authored with Gerrit Lloyd

Ballads and Poems, 1915–1930, 1931

A Book of Americans, 1933, co-authored with Rosemary Carr Benét, his wife

James Shore's Daughter: A Novel, 1934