James W. Benét "was interested in everything from the Byzantine Emperors to the development of heavy ordnance," Stephen wrote in 1940, "and was the finest critic of poetry I have ever known." He was Benét's lifelong hero. Benét's mother, Frances Neill Rose Benét, was also an avid reader and the author of occasional verse; his sister Laura, fourteen years his senior, and his brother William, twelve years his senior, were both poets and authors as well.
Benét grew up in a series of army-base homes that introduced him to several regions of the United States: he was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and spent his first five years in Watervliet, New York, a year in Illinois, six years in Benicia, California, and four years in Augusta, Georgia. He entered Yale at the age of seventeen. Encouraged by his family, he was from the beginning a precocious reader and writer of fiction and verse, immersing himself in William Makepeace Thackeray, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, William Morris, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, G.K. Chesterton, and dozens of lesser lights--and in the traditions of American military history. Although a traumatic year at Hitchcock Military Academy in Jacinto, California, in 1910-1911, showed him that military life could be mean and brutal, Benét basically loved and applauded the principles of honor, courage, duty, and patriotism which he found embodied in his father's career.
This is a free page. This page contains 183 words. This
biography contains 4,561 words (approx. 15 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Stephen Vincent Benet Access Pass.
