Stephen Vincent Benét is best known as the author of the classic Civil War verse epic John Brown's Body (1928) and the much-anthologized short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1936). Yet, Benét, once one of the most popular writers in America, wrote many more stories, novels, poems, and dramas. The fact that Benét wrote plays has largely been forgotten, even though millions of Americans heard his radio plays in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Benét's poems and prose emphasize the spoken word and, in fact, many of his short stories have been adapted as plays by other writers because of their inherent stageability.

Stephen Vincent Benét was born on 22 July 1898 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Colonel James Walker Benét and Frances Neill Benét. His father, as a military man, took Stephen and his older siblings...