The Last Circle

by Stephen Vincent Benét

Introduction
Annotated Edition
The bishop's beggar
The captives
The minister's books
The angel was a Yankee
As it was in the beginning
If this should change
To the people of France
Song for three soldiers
Remarks from a back-row seat by an amateur propagandist
Tuesday, November 5th, 1940
The three fates
A gentleman of fortune
Famous
Good picker
The prodigal children
This bright dream
William Riley & the fates
The danger of shadows
The gold dress
The land where there is no death
For remembrance (To R.C.B.)
Memento Mori
Little testament

Genres: Poetry, American

Library Binding

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

Stephen Vincent Benét, best known brother of William Rose Benét, also wrote John Brown's Body , his narrative poem of Civil War, in 1928. See John Brown.

A mother bore Stephen Vincent Benét into a military family. His father and Laura Benét, his sibling, also widely appreciated literature.

Benét attended Yale University and published Five Men and Pompey in 1915 and The Drug-Shop , collection, in 1917. A year of military service interrupted his studies; he worked as a cipher clerk in the same department as James Grover Thurber. He submitted his third volume of in place of a thesis, and Yale graduated him in 1919.

Stephen Vincent Benét published The Beginning of Wisdom , his first novel, in 1921. Benét then moved to France to continue his studies at the Sorbonne and returned to the United States in 1923 with the Rosemary Carr, his new wife.

Benét succeeded in many different literary forms, which included novels, short stories, screenplays, radio broadcasts, and a libretto for an opera, which Douglas Moore based on "The Devil and Daniel Webster." For his most famous long work, which interweaves historical and fictional characters to relate important events, from the raid on Harper's Ferry to surrender of Robert Edward Lee at Appomattox, he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1929.

During lifetime, Benét received the story prize of O. Henry, the Roosevelt Medal, and a second Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for the posthumously-published Western Star, the first part of an epic, based on American history. At the age of 44 years, Benét suffered a heart attack and died in New York City.