Stephen Vincent Benét

Early life

Benét was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to James Walker Benét, a colonel in the United States Army, and his wife. His grandfather and namesake was a Minorcan descendant born in St. Augustine, Florida, who led the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, 1874–1891, with the rank of brigadier general; he was a graduate of the United States Military Academy and served in the American Civil War. The younger Benét's paternal uncle, Laurence Vincent Benét, a graduate of Yale, was an ensign in the United States Navy during the Spanish–American War and later manufactured the French-Hotchkiss machine gun.

At about age ten, Benét was sent to the Hitchcock Military Academy. He graduated from The Albany Academy in Albany, New York and 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 campus humor magazine The Yale Record. Benét published his first book at age 17. He was awarded an M.A. in English upon submission of his third volume of poetry in lieu of a thesis. Benét was also a part-time contributor for the early Time magazine.

In 1920-1921 he went to France on a Yale traveling fellowship. There he met Rosemary Carr, whom he married in Chicago in November 1921. Carr was also a writer and poet, and they collaborated on some works.

Man of letters

Benét helped solidify the place of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and the Yale University Press during his decade-long judgeship of the competition. Benét published the first volumes of James Agee, Muriel Rukeyser, Jeremy Ingalls, and Margaret Walker. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1931.

Benét's fantasy short story about a devil, The Devil and Daniel Webster (1936) won an O. Henry Award. 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 the man Daniel Webster encounters the Leviathan of biblical legend.

Young Benét lived in a home (commonly referred to as Benét House), in Augusta, Georgia. Part of Augusta College (now Augusta University), it was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1971. Benet House, now on the Summerville Campus of Augusta University, was originally part of the Augusta Arsenal. Benet's father, Col James Walker Benet, along with his wife and daughter, lived in this house while he was the commanding officer of the Augusta Arsenal from approximately August 1911 to February 1919. Stephen Vincent Benet would have visited his parents while they were resident. The local newspaper considered it newsworthy enough to congratulate Benet on winning the Maysfield Prize for best undergraduate poem while Benet attended Yale.(Augusta Chronicle 1/21/1917 p. 21) Benet House was the name assigned to the building when it became the property of Augusta College. Once the residence of the college president, it now serves as space for administrative offices. Benet House was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1971.

Death and legacy

Benét died of a heart attack in New York City, on March 13, 1943, at the age of 44 and 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 the life and works of Benét, 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.

The title of Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a history of Native Americans in the American West in the late nineteenth century, is taken from the final phrase of Benét's poem "American Names". The full quotation, "I shall not be there/I shall rise and pass/Bury my heart at Wounded Knee," appears at the beginning of Brown's book. Benet's poem is not about the plight of Native Americans, and Benet would have been unlikely to approve of the author's approach. Wounded Knee, a village on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota, was the location of the last major confrontation between the U.S. Army and Native Americans. The event is known formally as the Wounded Knee Massacre, as more than 150 Sioux men, women, and children who were largely unarmed were killed that day.

He adapted the Roman myth of the rape of the Sabine Women into the story "The Sobbin' Women". It was adapted as the movie musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

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, and directed by Charles Laughton. The book of the same name was included in Life Magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944.

Benét fathered three children: Thomas, Stephanie, and Rachel. His brother, William Rose Benét, was a poet, anthologist and critic who is largely remembered for his desk reference Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia (1948). His sister Laura Benét was also an author.

Selected works

These works were published posthumously: