Between the years 1928 and 1943, Stephen Vincent Benét was one of the best-known living American poets, more widely read than Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, or Wallace Stevens and as well respected in book review columns. He was a rarity among twentieth-century authors, a poet whose books sold in the tens of thousands and who was honored in the poetry workshops and lecture halls of prestigious universities. Since that time, his reputation has declined steeply among literary sophisticates to the point where his poetry is seldom included in college literary anthologies and his name is often neglected in literary histories; but his poems and several of his short stories remain steadily in print, finding a sizable audience among general readers year after year.

Benét was the youngest of the three children of James Walker Benét, U.S. Army, a literate...