Benét, Stephen Vincent

Related Category: American Literature: Biographies

(bĕnā´), 1898–1943, American poet and author, b. Bethlehem, Pa., grad. Yale, 1919; brother of William Rose Benét. After graduating from college, Benét published several volumes of verse, including A Ballad of William Sycamore (1923), and several novels, of which Jean Huguenot (1923) and The Spanish Bayonet (1926) are the best. He is most famous for John Brown's Body (1928), a long narrative poem of the Civil War (Pulitzer Prize, 1929), and his short story, “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” Western Star, a long narrative poem about the westward migration left unfinished at his death, was published in 1943 (Pulitzer Prize, 1944).

See his selected works (2 vol., 1942); letters, ed. by C. A. Fenton (1960); studies by C. A. Fenton (1978) and W. R. Benét (1979).