Stephen Vincent Benét (July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943) was an American author,
poet,
short story writer, and
novelist. Benét is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the
American Civil War,
John Brown's Body (1928), for which he won a
Pulitzer Prize in 1929, and for two short stories, "
The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1936) and "
By the Waters of Babylon" (1937). In 2009,
The Library of America selected Benét’s story "The King of the Cats" (1929) for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of
American Fantastic Tales, edited by
Peter Straub.