The Great White Wall

William Rose Benét was born on 2nd February 1886 in Brooklyn, New York.

For at least the previous two generations the family had distinguished itself in the military. But now Benét, along with his younger and more famous brother Stephen Vincent, would bring the Pulitzer Prize to the family’s history.

Benét was educated The Albany Academy in Albany and then Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, graduating with a Ph.B. in 1907. At Yale, he edited and contributed light verse to its on-campus humor magazine The Yale Record.

Later in 1924 he began the Saturday Review of Literature which he continued to edit and write for until his death.

He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1942 for his book of autobiographical verse, ‘The Dust Which Is God’ (1941). He is also the author of The Reader's Encyclopedia, a standard American guide to world literature.

Benét married four times. The first, to Teresa France Thomson in 1912, produced three children before her death in 1912. In 1923 he married the glamourous and very talented poet Elinor Wylie who died in 1928. A five-year marriage in 1932 preceded his marriage to the children’s writer Marjorie Flack in 1941.

William Rose Benét died on 4th May, 1950.