John Brown's Body

Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company (Presumed 1st Trade Edition, 1928). Hardcover with black boards, faded gilt lettering on spine, 377 pages. No dust jacket, if issued. Pages toned; deckled edges. Gift inscription from 1928 on FFEP, but otherwise clean and unmarked. Front hinge is cracked and there is some play in the binding; text block intact. Boards have a few water stains. Slight damage to spine extremities. Moderate bumping to corners. See our photos for condition.

ABOUT THE BOOK: One of the most widely read poems of our time, John Brown's Body is Stephen Vincent Benét's masterful retelling of the Civil War. A book of great energy and sweep, it swings into view the entire course of that terrible and decisive war, lighting up the lives of soldiers, leaders, and civilians, North and South, amidst the conflict. Generations of readers have found the book a compelling and moving experience. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1929. It was written while Benét lived in Paris after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1926.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stephen Vincent Benét (1898 - 1943) was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. He wrote a book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, "John Brown's Body" (1928), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and for the short stories "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1936) and "By the Waters of Babylon" (1937). In 2009, Library of America selected his story "The King of the Cats" (1929) for inclusion in its two-century retrospectiveof American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub.