초록/요약

Stephen Vincent Benét, writer of novels, screenplays, radio dramas, short stories, essays, poetry, and propaganda, died in 1943 while in his most productive period, fighting fascism through American radio broadcasts. His death was widely mourned by the public, but he has been forgotten and generally ignored by literary critics since the nineteen-forties. Benét believed in an American-style culture of civic nationalism, which he hoped would lay the foundation for a national literature distinct from European influence. Ironically, he was moving beyond this nationalist aim toward a larger, Western belief near the end of his life. Most scholars are unfamiliar with that shift, and continue to think of him as a narrow nationalist. This might possibly explain much of his obscurity, for fascism had left a taint upon nationalism in the West. Such was especially the case with the rise of the literary left in the 1960s, and perhaps accounts for much of Benét’s continuing obscurity in a time of ethnic and multicultural divisions of American literature. But perhaps Benét and his vision are due a revisit, even a re-evaluation, in that his trajectory near the end of his short life was conveying him from a solely American cultural identity to a broader civilizational one, and erasing cultural borders in the process.