Stephen Vincent Benet

Book excerpt: When Stephen Vincent Benet died in 1943 at the age of 44, all of America mourned the loss. Benet was one of the country's most well known poets of the first half of the twentieth century and as a fiction writer, he had an even larger audience. This book is a collection of essays celebrating Benet and his writing. The first group of essays addresses Benet's life, times, and personal relationships. Thomas Carr Benet reminisces about his father in the first essay, and others consider Benet's marriage to his wife Rosemary; Archibald MacLeish, Thornton Wilder and Benet as friends, liberal humanists and public activists; and his friendships with Philip Barry, Jed Harris, and Thornton Wilder. The second group contains essays about Benet's poetry, fiction, and drama. They discuss Benet's role in the development of historical poetry in America, John Brown's Body and the Civil War, Hawthorne, Benet and historical fiction, Benet's Faustian America, the adaptation of "The Devil and Daniel Webster" to drama and then to film, Benet's use of fantasy and science fiction, and Benet as a dramatist for stage, screen and radio.