Two years after his first book met the world, a young Stephen Vincent Benét posed as a Yale student on July 22, 1919, his intense gaze belying the massive, sweeping epics brewing in his mind. Benét did not merely record history; he remade it into folklore. By standardizing the grit of the Civil War into the pulsing rhythms of John Brown’s Body and pitting a New England orator against the devil himself, Benét gave a young, industrializing America its own homemade mythology.
The hidden tragedy of Benét’s brilliant, youthful posture here is the physical toll of his creative fire. Throughout his time at Yale and his subsequent writing career, Benét suffered from severe, agonizing spinal arthritis. His romantic, sweeping prose about marching soldiers and untamed American frontiers was written by a man who could often barely move his own body. Every heartfelt line he penned about the vast American landscape was a triumph of a boundless mind over a frail, locked cage of bone.
