THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM

New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1921. First Edition. Cloth. Fine/None. Small 8vo (7 5/8" x 5 1/8"), black cloth with red lettering on spine and front cover, [xii] + 359 pages. Stephen Vincent Benét (1898 - 1943) was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. He 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 the 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. Square, bright, clean copy without any writing, inscriptions, or annotations. Pages are uniformly age-toned--a constant feature of this book due to the paper used.