A short life of the author
Stephen Vincent Benét (22 July 1898 – 13 March 1943) was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist who wrote the most ambitious and most popular American narrative poem of the twentieth century — John Brown’s Body (1928), a book-length epic of the Civil War that won the Pulitzer Prize — and the most famous American short story about the national character — “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936), in which the great orator argues a case against Satan himself for the soul of a New Hampshire farmer. Benét died at forty-four, his career cut short by overwork and failing health, but his best work has the scope, the ambition, and the patriotic intensity that make it permanently American.
Early Life
Benét was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, into a literary family with a strong military tradition — his father was a colonel in the Army Ordnance Corps, and both his brother (William Rose Benét, also a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet) and his sister were writers. He published his first book of poems at seventeen and graduated from Yale in 1919, where he was part of a generation that included Thornton Wilder and Archibald MacLeish. He studied at the Sorbonne and lived in Paris during the 1920s, where he wrote John Brown’s Body on a Guggenheim Fellowship.
John Brown’s Body (1928)
Benét’s masterwork is a narrative poem of over 15,000 lines that tells the story of the American Civil War from John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 to the surrender at Appomattox in 1865. The poem follows multiple fictional characters — a Connecticut volunteer, a Georgia planter’s son, a runaway slave, a Pennsylvania farmer’s daughter — whose individual stories are woven into the larger narrative of the war. It uses a variety of verse forms — blank verse, ballad stanzas, prose passages, song lyrics — and its ambition is frankly Homeric: to tell the national story in a national poem.
The poem won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and sold enormously well — an unusual achievement for a long narrative poem in the era of modernist fragmentation. It was read aloud at public events, staged as a dramatic reading with a cast of actors (a 1953 Broadway production starred Tyrone Power, Judith Anderson, and Raymond Massey), and became a standard text in American schools.
Its critical reputation has fluctuated. Modernist poets and critics dismissed it as old-fashioned and rhetorically inflated — it was not Pound, it was not Eliot, it was not experimental. But its narrative power, its emotional range, and its genuine engagement with the moral complexities of the Civil War — particularly slavery — have kept it alive.
”The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936)
Benét’s most famous short story is a modern American tall tale. Jabez Stone, a desperate New Hampshire farmer, sells his soul to the Devil (called “Mr. Scratch”). When the Devil comes to collect, Stone appeals to Daniel Webster — the great orator, senator, and champion of the Union — who agrees to argue the case before a jury of the damned. Webster wins, not by legal argument but by an appeal to the American spirit — to liberty, to hope, to the idea that every human soul is worth fighting for.
The story has been adapted as an opera (by Douglas Moore, 1939), a film (All That Money Can Buy, 1941), and countless stage productions. It is one of the rare American stories that functions as national myth.
Western Star (1943)
Benét’s unfinished poem, published posthumously, was intended as a companion to John Brown’s Body — an epic of the American westward migration from the Mayflower to the Gold Rush. Only the first book was completed before his death. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry posthumously.
Critical Standing
Benét’s reputation has suffered from his association with a kind of earnest American patriotism that fell out of fashion in the ironic, deconstructive mood of the late twentieth century. He was not an innovator in form; he was a storyteller in verse, and his ambitions were narrative and national rather than personal and experimental. But John Brown’s Body remains a remarkable achievement — one of the few successful long narrative poems in modern American literature — and “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is immortal.
Collecting Benét
John Brown’s Body (1928, Doubleday, Doran) in first edition with dust jacket brings $200–$500. The limited signed edition (475 copies) is more valuable. Thirteen O’Clock (1937), containing “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” is collectible. Western Star (1943, Farrar & Rinehart) is of interest as an incomplete masterpiece.