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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.5209
EAN: 9780786413645
ISBN: 0786413646
Label: McFarland & Company
Manufacturer: McFarland & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 256
Publication Date: 2002-12-09
Publisher: McFarland & Company
Studio: McFarland & Company

When Stephen Vincent Benét died in 1943 at the age of 44, all of America mourned the loss. Benét 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 Benét and his writing. The first group of essays addresses Benét's life, times, and personal relationships. Thomas Carr Benét reminisces about his father in the first essay, and others consider Benét's marriage to his wife Rosemary; Archibald MacLeish, Thornton Wilder and Benét as friends, liberal humanists and public activists; and his friendships with Philip Barry, Jed Harris, and Thornton Wilder.

The second group contains essays about Benét's poetry, fiction, and drama. They discuss Benét's role in the development of historical poetry in America, John Brown's Body and the Civil War, Hawthorne, Benét and historical fiction, Benét's Faustian America, the adaptation of "The Devil and Daniel Webster" to drama and then to film, Benét's use of fantasy and science fiction, and Benét as a dramatist for stage, screen and radio.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: An Old Master With Plenty Left To Say
Review: Academics have never been thrilled with Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943), whose polished but accessible writings--notably his magazine short stories--went straight to the heart of Everyman and Everywoman.
Everyman remembers; and in the wake of the tragedy of 9/11 this neglected master seems to have more to say than ever--about his country and the world, their history and their destiny.
One academic who is ready to listen is David Garrett Izzo. He appears to have thought about doing a collection of essays on Benet as long ago as 1998, when he played a prominent role in a Benet centenary observance in the Bethlehem, PA area. The resulting book, in which Izzo shares the editing responsibility with Lincoln Konkle, should do something at last to stir up interest in this once-famous writer on the campus. The essays cover many aspects of Benet's output and career--from the famous Civil War narrative "John Brown's Body" to his historical and science fiction stories, such as "The Devil and Daniel Webster" and "By The Waters of Babylon." But to this reviewer three of the essays are paramount in interest. They are Izzo's own piece on Benet and his literary colleageus at Yale; Thomas Carr Benet's remembrance of his father, and Patricia McAndrew's paper on the marriage of Stephen and Rosemary Benet.

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