Stephen Vincent Benet

Stephen Vincent Benet

Only in a time when the pressure of the world amounts to angst and the fight for freedom can a world advance in it's literary achievements. A writer, just like an artist, builds his creations from the mood and settings of the surrounding atmosphere. In the first half of the twentieth century, the atmosphere was filled with resources to stimulate literary creativity, such as the second World War and the Great Depression (Roache 102: 14). The social genre of the time gave way to the broad appeal to American life and the focus of freedom leading to original stories and historical themes (Folsom 3: 953). Of course, the past would remain a constant influence. Some common topics were the

Civil War and the settlement of western U.S. frontier life (Magill 1: 174).

Stephen Vincent Benet took all these factors into mind during his life as a twentieth century writer/poet. Keeping the times, the life, and the literature of Stephen Vincent Benet a major part of his influence and achievements, he helped push America towards a united cultural victory.

Stephen Vincent Benet was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to James

Walker Benet, a career military officer, and Francis Neill Rose Benet on the twenty-second of July 1898 (Roache 102: 11, 13). He described himself as a positive-thinking and modest man, who is thin, attractive, vivacious, whereas his wife and his mother-in-law would consider him a plain, tall, large biter-of- nails who carries a foolish expression, but whose intellect is too much for words (Parsekian 1).

He couldn't have been too foolish of a person due to his positive upbringing. Benet's parents planned for him to be a success in whatever he chose to do. Their open-mindedness encouraged him to explore books and ideas in a professional state., as well as to appreciate and take literature and history very seriously (Roache 102: 13). Because of this upbringing, all three Benet children became poets and authors. (Stephen Vincent Benet was the youngest of them.) Much influence over the Benets came from love for the country because

James' military work called for traveling between Georgia, California, Illinois,

New York, and Pennsylvania (Griffith 11).

Benet's education shows how successful he really was. He entered Yale

University at 17 years old, when he published his first book. About that time, he became professional with New York writers (Roache 102: 13). Stephen Vincent

Benet earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1919 and his Master of Arts degree in 1920 at Yale before accepting a fellowship to Paris where he could live cheaply and write his first novel and would later find his wife.