Stephen Vincent Benét

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Stephen Vincent Benét (July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943) was an American author, 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 won a Pulitzer Prize in 1929, and for two short stories, The Devil and Daniel Webster and By the Waters of Babylon.

1 Life and Career
2 Selected works
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Life and Career

Benet's fantasy short story The Devil and Daniel Webster won an O. Henry Award, and he furnished the material for Scratch, a one-act opera by Douglas Moore. The story was filmed in 1941 and shown originally under the title All That Money Can Buy. Benét also wrote a sequel, Daniel Webster and the Sea Serpent, in which real-life historic figure Webster encounters the Leviathan of biblical legend.

Benét was born into an Army family in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He spent most of his boyhood in Benicia, California. At the age of about ten, Benét was sent to the Hitchcock Military Academy. A graduate of The Albany Academy in Albany, New York and Yale University, where he was a member of Wolf's Head Society and the power behind the Yale Lit, according to Thornton Wilder.

Benét died in New York City at the age of 44. He was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for Western Star, an unfinished narrative poem on the settling of America.

It was a line of Benet's poetry that gave the title to Dee Brown's famous history of the destruction of Native American tribes by the United States: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

He also adapted the Roman myth of the rape of the Sabine Women into the story The Sobbin' Women, which in turn was adapted into the movie musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

John Brown's Body was staged on Broadway in 1953, in a three-person dramatic reading featuring Tyrone Power, Judith Anderson and Raymond Massey, and directed by Charles Laughton.

Benet's brother, William Rose Benét (1886–1950), was a poet, anthologist and critic who is largely remembered for his desk reference, The Reader's Cyclopedia (1948).

[edit] Selected works

Five Men and Pompey, 1915
The Drug-Shop, or, Endymion in Edmonstoun (Yale University Prize Poem), 1917 [1]
Young Adventure, 1918 (full text)
Heavens and Earth, 1920
The Beginnings of Wisdom, 1921
Young People's Pride, 1922
Jean Huguenot, 1923
The Ballad of William Sycamore, 1923
King David, 1923
Nerves, 1924 (with John Farrar)
That Awful Mrs. Eaton, 1924 (with John Farrar)
Tiger Joy, 1925
Spanish Bayonet, 1926
John Brown's Body, 1928
The Barefoot Saint, 1929
The Litter of Rose Leaves, 1930
Abraham Lincoln, 1930 (screenplay with Gerrit Lloyd)
Ballads and Poems, 1915-1930, 1931
A Book of Americans, 1933 (with Rosemary Carr Benét)
James Shore's Daughter, 1934
The Burning City, 1936 (includes 'Litany for Dictatorships')
The Magic of Poetry and the Poet's Art, 1936
By the Waters of Babylon, 1937
The Headless Horseman, 1937
Thirteen O'Clock, 1937
Johnny Pye and the Fool Killer, 1938
Tales Before Midnight, 1939
The Ballad of the Duke's Mercy, 1939
Nightmare at Noon, 1940
Elementals, 1940-41 (broadcast)
Freedom's Hard-Bought Thing, 1941 (broadcast)
Listen to the People, 1941
A Summons to the Free, 1941
Cheers for Miss Bishop, 1941 (screenplay with Adelaide Heilbron, Sheridan Gibney)
They Burned the Books, 1942
Selected Works, 1942 (2 vols.)
Short Stories, 1942
Nightmare at Noon, 1942 (in The Treasury Star Parade, ed. by William A. Bacher)
A Child is Born, 1942 (broadcast)
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

[edit] References

Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers, 46-47.
Fenton, Charles A. (1958 repr. 1978). Stephen Vincent Benét: The Life and Times of an American Man of Letters, 1898-1943. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313202001.