(Provides young readers with this classic poem about the a...)
Provides young readers with this classic poem about the adventures of a preacher and a teacher who planted apple seeds along the Ohio River in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
(Thank you for checking out this book by Theophania Publis...)
Thank you for checking out this book by Theophania Publishing. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you soon. We have thousands of titles available, and we invite you to search for us by name, contact us via our website, or download our most recent catalogues. THEY came over the Pass one day in one big wagon—all ten of them—man and woman and hired girl and seven big boy children, from the nine-year-old who walked by the team to the baby in arms. Or so the story runs—it was in the early days of settlement and the town had never heard of the Sobbin' Women then. But it opened its eyes one day, and there were the Pontipees. They were there but they didn't stay long—just time enough to buy meal and get a new shoe for the lead horse. You couldn't call them unsociable, exactly—they seemed to be sociable enough among themselves. But you could tell, somehow, from the look of them, that they weren't going to settle on ground other people had cleared. They were all high-colored and dark-haired—handsome with a wilderness handsomeness—and when you got them all together, they looked more like a tribe or a nation than an ordinary family. I don't know how they gave folks that feeling, but they did. Yes, even the baby, when the town women tried to handle him. He was a fine, healthy baby, but they said it was like trying to pet a young raccoon. Well, that was all there was to it, at the start. They paid for what they bought in good money and drove on up into Sobbin' Women Valley—only it wasn't called Sobbin' Women Valley then. And pretty soon, there was smoke from a chimney there that hadn't been there before. But you know what town gossip is when it gets started. The Pontipees were willing enough to let other folks alone—in fact, that was what they wanted. But, because it was what they wanted, the town couldn't see why they wanted it. Towns get that way, sometimes.
SELECTED WORKS OF STEPHEN VINCENT BENET Poetry and Prose (VOLUMES 1 & 2)
(Both volumes are first edition, 1942, first printing, alm...)
Both volumes are first edition, 1942, first printing, almost like-new, except for slight foxing to end pages and inside boards and slight dulling to the embossed gilt on spines, from Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. The books come in the original slip case which is rubbed at the corners and coming loose on two edges. The slip case measures about 6" X 9" X 1 1/4".
Stephen Vincent Benét was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist who twice won a Pulitzer Prize.
Background
Stephen Benet was the second son and the youngest of three children of James Walker Benét and Frances Neill (Rose) Benét. His birthplace was Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where his father, an army ordnance officer, was stationed at the Bethlehem Iron Works; his ancestral roots were in Florida, his great-great-grandfather Esteban Benét having come to St. Augustine from the Spanish island of Minorca about 1785. The family had a strong military tradition. Both Stephen's father and his paternal grandfather, after whom he was named, were West Point graduates; the elder Stephen Vincent Benét, though born in Florida, served in the Union Army during the Civil War and later became chief of army ordnance (1874 - 1891). An uncle who settled in France, Laurence Vincent Benét, became an official of La Société Hotchkiss et Cie. , international munitions makers. Yet the Benét household was a literary one, and both Stephen's sister, Laura, and his brother, William Rose, became well-known authors in their own right. His father he later remembered as "the finest critic of poetry" he had ever known, and one who had taught him "many things about the writing of English verse, and tolerance, and independence and curiosity of mind. " Benét spent his childhood years at the Watervliet Arsenal in upper New York and the Benicia Arsenal in California. When he was three, scarlet fever weakened his eyesight, a condition that later frustrated his ambition to follow his father to West Point.
Education
At about age ten, Benét was sent to the Hitchcock Military Academy, California. He graduated from Summerville Academy in Augusta, Georgia, and from Yale University.
Career
Following the example of his brother and sister, Stephen began to write verse; by 1913 he had published poems in St. Nicholas magazine, and his first slim collection, Five Men and Pompey, appeared in 1915. He published his second and third volumes of verse, The Drug-Shop (1917) and Young Adventure (1918), while still an undergraduate. In a literary workshop taught by Henry Seidel Canby he began his first novel, at the same time publishing his first short stories, in Munsey's and Smart Set. His manuscript of verse, submitted in lieu of the regular master's thesis, not only brought him the degree but, when published as Heavens and Earth (1920), won him the Poetry Society of America award in 1921, which he shared with Carl Sandburg. Going abroad on a Yale traveling fellowship, Benét enrolled at the Sorbonne in the fall of 1920. Meanwhile Benét published two more novels, Young People's Pride (1922) and Jean Huguenot (1923), the latter about an eccentric Southern belle. With Carl Brandt as his agent, he now concentrated on formula short stories for popular magazines, stories which remained a financial mainstay for the rest of his career.
Benet continued to write verse, however, and in 1925 brought out, to considerable critical applause, a selection entitled Tiger Joy. His next book, Spanish Bayonet (1926), a romantic historical novel set in colonial Florida, failed to place as a magazine serial because Benét refused to change the unhappy ending, but he had the satisfaction of having handled the narrative with the artistic conscience he usually reserved for his poetry. Increasingly unhappy with the popular fiction that Brandt was marketing for him, he began to experiment with American materials set in the past, often leavening them with fantasy to achieve the romantic and colorful quality of folklore. One of his first successful tales in this vein was "The Sobbin' Women" (1926). In 1926 four tales were cited in the honor rolls of both the O'Brien and the O. Henry anthologies of the year's best stories, and several, including "The Devil and Daniel Webster" and "Johnny Pye and the Fool-Killer, " were subsequently published in special limited editions.
Meanwhile, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1926 enabled Benét to take his family to France, where he worked on an epic poem about the American Civil War. John Brown's Body (1928), a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, became an immediate best seller and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1929. Despite its popular acclaim, the poem was given only qualified praise by serious literary critics. Harriet Monroe dubbed it "a cinema epic. " Nevertheless, Benét's reputation as a leading American poet had been established, and his status was consolidated by election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1929 and to its inner circle, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in 1938.
Benét had won financial success only to lose it in the stock market crash of 1929, which took most of his invested royalties. Prodded by Brandt, he went to Hollywood in 1929 to write the screenplay for D. W. Griffith's film Abraham Lincoln, for which he was paid $12, 000. He disliked Hollywood and returned to grinding out popular short stories at reduced fees. From time to time he engaged in literary journalism for publications as varied as Fortune and the New York Herald Tribune's book section. He accepted the editorship of the Yale Younger Poet Series, which annually published the work of an unknown poet, and became co-editor of the Rivers of America Series for Farrar and Rinehart.
In collaboration with his wife, Benet brought out A Book of Americans (1933), a volume of light verse about famous historical characters. Benét's last novel, James Shore's Daughter, a comment on the American rich, appeared in 1934. He still found time for poetry and published Burning City (1936), in which he expressed the stresses of a "decade of tension. " In 1937 he wrote the libretto for Douglas Moore's radio operetta The Headless Horseman, and he adapted his own memorable story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" both to an opera (1938), in collaboration with Moore, and to a film, All That Money Can Buy (1941). But his incessant labor took its toll; he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1939, his condition complicated by severe arthritis.
Benét had long abhorred totalitarianism, and at the outbreak of World War II he turned to writing propaganda against the Axis powers, justifying it as both an art and a necessary task. This work included Dear Adolf (1942) and radio scripts collected as We Stand United (1945). Early in 1943 he obliged the Office of War Information with America, a brief history that was published in 1945 and distributed wholesale throughout liberated Europe and Asia. Soon after writing it Benét died of a heart seizure at his home in New York City at the age of forty-four. He was buried in the Stonington (Connecticut) Cemetery near his summer home. A long fragment of an epic poem about the American westward movement on which Benét had been working for fifteen years was posthumously published in 1943 as Western Star; like John Brown's Body, it was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club and won a Pulitzer Prize.
Achievements
Stephen Benet was an outstanding poet, novelist and screenwriter who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for John Brown's Body in 1929 and the second time in 1944. Benet's short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" won an O. Henry Award in 1937. Benet also was editor of the Yale Younger Poet Series and co-editor of the Rivers of America Series for Farrar and Rinehart.
Benet's major works: Five Men and Pompey (1915); The Drug-Shop, or, Endymion in Edmonstoun (1917); Young Adventure: A book of Poems (1918); Heavens and Earth (1920); The Beginnings of Wisdom (1921); Young People's Pride (1922); Jean Huguenot (1923); The Ballad of William Sycamore (1923); King David (1923); Nerves (1924); That Awful Mrs. Eaton (1924); Tiger Joy: A Book of Poems (1925); The Mountain Whippoorwill: How Hill-Billy Jim Won the Great Fiddler's Prize: A Poem (1925); Spanish Bayonet (1926); John Brown's Body (1928); The Barefoot Saint (1929); The Litter of Rose Leaves (1930), etc.
Stephen Benet was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
In a eulogy the poet Archibald MacLeish, a friend since their student days at Yale, praised Benét as a man "altogether without envy or vanity, " who never "tried to present himself as anything but what he was. "
Connections
On November 26, 1921, Stephen Benet married Rosemary Carr of Chicago. It was a happy marriage, to which were born three children: Stephanie Jane in 1924, Thomas Carr in 1926, and Rachel Carr in 1931.
Father:
James Walker Benét
Mother:
Frances Neill (Rose) Benét
Sister:
Laura Benet
Wife:
Rosemary (Carr) Benet
Grandfather:
Stephen Vincent Benét
Daughter:
Stephanie (Benet) Mahin
Daughter:
Rachel Felicity (Benet) Lewis
Son:
Thomas Carr Benet
Brother:
William Rose Benet
Uncle:
Laurence Vincent Benét
He was an official of La Société Hotchkiss et Cie.
