Poetry

In 1926 Benét was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to live with his young family in Paris for two years and write John Brown's Body. At the time he had already published four volumes of poetry and four novels, supporting himself in part by writing short stories for popular magazines. Little that he had written up to that point indicated the phenomenal success that was to come with John Brown's Body (1928). Benét was not particularly gifted as a novelist, and though his chief aspiration was to be remembered as a poet, much of his poetry had been more earnest than successful. His greatest success had come with a handful of narrative ballads primarily on popular American themes, most notably The Mountain Whippoorwill. The story of the boy who gives his all and emerges triumphant in a contest with the great fiddlers of the Georgia hills, climaxing with the exclamation Hell's broke loose in Georgia! quickly became a part of American folklore.

John Brown's Body, a narrative of the American Civil War, develops this American voice, embracing North and South, wealthy and poor, farmer and dandy, black and white, general and private. Its story interweaves fictional characters with historical figures of the Civil War. The moral evil of slavery is presented in the prelude, a vignette aboard a Yankee slave ship, but the poem that follows, in eight books and over eleven thousand lines, is not a melodrama of good and evil but a complex study of courage and weakness, characterized more often by failure than by triumph. If human progress prevails in the end, symbolized by the two marriages that follow the death and destruction of the war, it comes at a cost in individual aspirations and lives that evokes the reader's sympathies.

The struggle to maintain human values in the face of the forces of destruction informs the best of Benét's lesser-known poetry. As the United States moved through financial depression toward World War II, Benét wrote a series of nightmare poems that came to focus on the title image of his last collection of poems, Burning City (1936), evoked in Litany for Dictatorships, which opens with the lines: “For all those beaten, for the broken heads, / For the fosterless, the simple, the oppressed, / The ghosts in the burning city of our time.…” Yet Benét retained his belief in the ultimate triumph of progress embodied in American liberal populism, called forth in his poem on the reelection of Franklin Roosevelt, Tuesday, November 5th, 1940 (1941), which concludes: “A country squire from Hyde Park with a Harvard accent, / Who never once failed the people / And whom the people won't fail.”

Fiction

Although Benét desired to be remembered as a poet, he wrote short stories from the time he completed his master's degree at Yale for the income they provided. The market for magazine fiction in the 1920s and even the 1930s was lucrative for someone who could write the expected formulas—which Benét could do with ease, though he considered the stories he produced vapid. The Devil and Daniel Webster was as much a revelation for Benét himself as for the reading public when it appeared in 1936, as it established that Benét could make money writing stories reflecting his true ability. The three dozen stories he wrote between 1936 and the coming of World War II, together with half a dozen of the best of his earlier stories, constitute a diverse body of work more successful than his poetry, John Brown's Body excepted.

“The Devil and Daniel Webster,” like “The Mountain Whippoorwill,” is a local color story, capturing the essence of a region, in this case New Hampshire, through a well-crafted story told in colloquial language. But Benét is thinking as well of the United States—what Daniel Webster in the story calls “the Union”—as a whole. In Daniel Webster, Benét finds a character representative of his own complex American feeling. Webster is shrewd, strong, generous, eloquent, good-humored, and down-to-earth. Yet he is also flawed; his career ends not in triumph but in compromise, as he makes his last important speech as a senator defending the Missouri Compromise, which would allow the extension of slavery into new states of the Union. Jabez Stone, who has sold his soul to the devil, is a smaller man and not really admirable—though not really evil either—yet a man and an American nevertheless. The jury that gathers to try him are likewise Americans, though traitors and criminals. Even the devil declares himself to be as American as any, pointing to the injustices done in the name of America to the Indians and the enslaved. In all this motley crew, however, there is something worth defending and preserving. Benét's own ironic good humor, intelligence, and generosity prevail in the end, as Stone is rescued and the devil acknowledges that, in spite of all that threatens it, including its own worst tendencies, the Union will be preserved.

Benét's short stories vary widely in time, place, and kind, from historical fictions such as The Devil and Daniel Webster to contemporary stories of Manhattan socialites to fantasies of the future. They differ widely in tone as well, from the whimsical to the serious. “Into Egypt,” published in 1939, shows Benét's awareness of what was happening to the Jews of Europe, while “The Blood of the Martyrs” anticipates the fate of intellectuals in dictatorial regimes around the world in the latter half of the twentieth century. “All around the Town” celebrates the working men and women who built Manhattan, while “The King of the Cats” celebrates the yielding of white American culture to the global multiracial culture that was already transforming Manhattan in the 1920s. In keeping with his nightmare poems is By the Waters of Babylon, written in 1937, perhaps the first story to imagine a postapocalyptic Manhattan. On a more personal level, A Death in the Country focuses on the difficulties of marriage. The Die-hard explores both the social and the personal, combining a story of the dangers of political obsession with a story of the need for fathers in the imaginative lives of children.

Democratic Propaganda

For Benét, as for Thomas Paine, the cause of America was the cause of all mankind. With the coming of World War II, Benét set aside all other work to devote himself to the American cause. America (1944), a history of the United States written at the suggestion of the War Department, was distributed around the world. Broadcasts of his radio plays—Dear Adolf, Listen to the People, We Stand United, The Watchers by the Stone—were listened to by Americans across the country. Pamphlets and public statements written on behalf of various patriotic organizations declared Benét's belief in liberal democracy, “unalterably opposed to class hatred, race hatred, religious hatred, however manifested, by whomever instilled.” Not just the United States, but its best ideals, must prevail.

Benét accepted no payment for this work, though he gave it his all. He suffered a heart attack while writing America, and though he seemed to recover, he suffered a second attack while working on yet another radio script. He died 13 March 1943. His second Pulitzer Prize, for the unfinished Western Star, was a recognition not of the merits of that work so much as of his work on behalf of his country and his fellow man.