29 pages • 58 minutes read
Stephen Vincent BenétThe Devil and Daniel Webster
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1937A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Stephen Vincent Benét
Content Warning: This section references slavery.
Stephen Vincent Benét was born in Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania, in July 1898. He attended Yale University, where he contributed to the campus humor magazine The Yale Record. The poet published his first book by the time he was 17 and received a master’s degree in English from Yale, submitting his third poetry collection in lieu of a thesis.
In addition to short stories like “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936) and “By the Waters of Babylon,” Benét is known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative poem, John Brown’s Body (1928), which chronicled the American Civil War. This war, as well as the events surrounding it, was a key facet of much of Benét’s writing; it underpins “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” where Webster’s concern with preserving the “Union” in the face of threatened secession is a recurring subject of conversation. Benét used the Civil War in part to convey pro-Allied Forces sentiments during World Wars I and II. When Benét was 10, he had attended Hitchcock Military Academy, but the US Army eventually rejected him due to his poor eyesight. Nevertheless, Benét made many contributions to the war effort during WWII, including a number of radio broadcasts, as well as a series of radio scripts such as “Listen to the People” (1941) and “They Burned the Books” (1942). He also worked as a cipher-clerk in Washington during the war.
Benét’s choice of subjects in poetry and fiction likely also stemmed from his family’s military history. His father, Colonel J. Walker Benét, was a cadet at the United States Military Academy and achieved the rank of captain in 1894, just five years before Stephen’s birth. His mother, Frances Neill (Rose) Benét also came from a large military family in Kentucky. Benét’s father, who loved poetry, was intensely supportive of his son’s literary aspirations.
Sociohistorical Context: The Antebellum US and World War II
The main narrative of “The Devil and Daniel Webster” takes place in the run-up to the American Civil War (1861-1865). In particular, the events transpire sometime during the negotiation of the Compromise of 1850. This set of five bills was one of numerous attempts to avert war amid escalating tensions between the North and South, principally over the issue of slavery. The question became more pressing throughout the early 19th century due in large part to American expansionism; each new state that joined the nation threatened to disrupt the balance of power in government, where states that allowed slavery and those that did not were represented roughly equally. Webster had been a vocal opponent of enslavement throughout his career but helped engineer the Compromise of 1850, which (among other things) allowed California to enter the US as a “free” state while requiring that states that prohibited slavery nevertheless aid in the recapture of fugitives from enslavement. Many of Webster’s former supporters viewed this as a betrayal, and Webster’s commitment to the “Union” at the expense of his ideals is part of the story’s exploration of Patriotism and the Limits of Loyalty.
The Union ultimately emerged victorious over the Confederacy more than 30 years before Benét’s birth. However, Benét came of age around the time of World War I, while World War II began as the poet entered his forties; Benét was therefore no stranger to military conflict. “The Devil and Daniel Webster” was written in the two decades that separated World Wars I and II, which suggests that the story is either a reaction to World War I or a response to global political unrest ahead of World War II. On its face, it is a patriotic story that could have rallied support for the US (and its allies) amid wars that were often conceptualized as clashes between representative democracy and authoritarian rule (monarchy in World War I and fascism in World War II).
