Stephen Vincent Benet

Stephen Vincent Benét (July 22, 1898, Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania, United States–March 13, 1943) was an American author, poet, short story writer and novelist. He is best known for his narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown's Body, published in 1928. He won a Pulitzer Prize for this work in 1929.

Benet's fantasy short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" won an O. Henry Award, and he furnished the material for a one-act opera by Douglas Moore.

Benét was born into an Army family in Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania, near Bethlehem in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. 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, 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.

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).

Selected works

• Five Men and Pompey, 1915
• The Drug-Shoop, 1917
• Young Adventure, 1918
• 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)
• 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