The Devil and Daniel Webster

Content Warning: This section references slavery.

Stephen Vincent Benét was born in Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania, in July 1898. He attended Yale University, where he contributed to the campus humor magazine The Yale Record. The poet published his first book by the time he was 17 and received a master’s degree in English from Yale, submitting his third poetry collection in lieu of a thesis.

In addition to short stories like “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936) and “By the Waters of Babylon,” Benét is known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative poem, John Brown’s Body (1928), which chronicled the American Civil War. This war, as well as the events surrounding it, was a key facet of much of Benét’s writing; it underpins “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” where Webster’s concern with preserving the “Union” in the face of threatened secession is a recurring subject of conversation. Benét used the Civil War in part to convey pro-Allied Forces sentiments during World Wars I and II. When Benét was 10, he had attended Hitchcock Military Academy, but the US Army eventually rejected him due to his poor eyesight. Nevertheless, Benét made many contributions to the war effort during WWII, including a number of radio broadcasts, as well as a series of radio scripts such as “Listen to the People” (1941) and “They Burned the Books” (1942).