Stephen Vincent Benét
(1898–1943)
Stephen Benét always wanted to become a writer, and he became quite a famous one. His career, however, seems paradoxical. During his lifetime he was hailed as a prodigy, and he was honored with prizes and appointments. Yet for most of his life, he had difficulty earning enough money to support his family. After Benét died, his reputation with critics plummeted, but readers still consider some of his poems and stories American classics. Seventy years after their first publication, they continue to appear in anthologies.
Benét was born into a family that was both military and literary. He idolized his father, James Walker Benét, a well-known army colonel who was himself the son of an important general. James Benét had a deep interest in history and literature, which he imparted to his family. Stephen’s sister, Laura, and brother, William Rose, both became writers and poets.
Stephen Benét entered Yale University at the age of seventeen and published his first book of poems, Five Men and Pompey, that same year. He published two more books of poetry before his graduation in 1919.
The young Benét was determined to earn his living as a writer, but he decided to support himself in the meantime by working in an advertising agency in New York. He left after three months. He returned to Yale for graduate studies and traveled to Paris on a fellowship in 1920. There he met a young journalist, Rosemary Carr, whom he married the next year and with whom he later collaborated on a collection of poems about American heroes called A Book of Americans.
In the 1920s, Benét began to develop an interest in American history and folklore that would later distinguish his work. He spent two years laboring on a long poem about the Civil War called John Brown’s Body (1928). The poem, about the radical abolitionist who was hanged in 1859 for raiding the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, won Benét national attention and the Pulitzer Prize. The fifteen-thousand-line poem also made him a bestselling author—one hundred thirty thousand copies were sold in the first two years.
Benét was pleased with the success of John Brown’s Body, but it did not bring the economic security he needed for his growing family. He found the constant worry about money degrading and hoped to escape it so he could concentrate on his work. However, unfortunately Benét also lost a great deal of money in the stock market crash of 1929. He turned to writing for popular magazines to make a living.
The Great Depression of the 1930s was a painful time for the writer, as he witnessed the economic decline of his own country and the rise of fascism in Europe. During these years, he wrote a series of poems reflecting his dark vision of the future, many of which appear in his collection Burning City (1936). Benét also began to suffer seriously from arthritis of the spine, which would plague him until his death in 1943.
In 1936, Benét published a story in The Saturday Evening Post called "The Devil and Daniel Webster." Based on the Faust legend of a man who makes a deal with the devil, the story became a classic of American folklore and won Benét the O. Henry Award. The story proved so popular that it was adapted into an opera, a play, and a film (retitled All That Money Can Buy). Benét’s story is still widely anthologized.
When World War II began, Benét threw himself into the war effort by writing speeches and radio scripts. All this volunteer work took its toll, and Benét died of a heart attack in 1943.
