Birthdays: A Lion of the Twenties

Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Poet, novelist, critic

Recipient, The Pulitzer Prize, 1929

Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 1931

Recipient, The O. Henry Award (1936)

If yesterday’s Literary Birthday honoree- Hart Crane, born 364 days after Benet- was the Bad Boy of American Letters in the Roaring Twenties, Stephen Vincent Benet was the era’s Golden Boy.

The grandson of a Civil War veteran who rose to a general’s rank, Benet published his first collection of poetry at 17. He was a powerhouse in literary circles at Yale; instead of submitting a thesis for his M.A. in English, he turned in his third published book of poetry. He got the degree.

Benet spent a decade judging the Yale younger poets competition, and his notice helped jump start a generation of American writers, including Muriel Rukeyser and James Agee. He wrote, part-time, for Time.

Drawing on the Civil War, on tales of which he’d been raised, Benet published a book-length poem, John Brown’s Body, in 1928. A best-seller, still in print, it won the Pulitzer Prize the next year.  His short story, The Devil and Daniel Webster, was the O. Henry Award in 1936 and was made into a successful film. Another short story, in which he turned the Roman myth of the rape of the Sabine women into, “The Sobbin’ Women,” became the technicolor movie, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

(Above: actor Walter Huston, as Satan in The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941))

Benet was a writing machine. Before his death, from a heart attack, at 44, he published forty books; nine more came out posthumously. His poetry and short stories are staples of anthologies to this day.

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