Rosemary Benét (March 31 [1943]) | Willa Cather Archive

#3132: Willa Cather to Rosemary Benét, March 31 [1943]

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⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ March 31^st Dear Rosemary Benét¹;

May I send a word to tell you how shocked and sad I am? Your loss³ and your sorrow are felt across the continent. When the old die we are sorry. But when we lose men in their prime, with their best force unspent, we feel defrauded.

Please do not reply to this word from me. To even acknowledge such letters is a cruel ordeal. But I hope that we may sometime meet again.

Yours Willa Cather Mrs. Stephen Vincent Benét¹ 215 East 68^th Street New York City² NEW YORK,N.Y.² MAR 31 1943 2-PM Please forward Willa Cather

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let3132.xml
Letter identifier: 3132
Contents: Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso. Includes one handwritten envelope.
Person to whom letter was written: Rosemary Benét ¹
Date letter was written: March 31 [1943]
Place letter was written: New York, New York, United States²
Location of original letter: Burton Jesse Hendrick Papers (MS 1980), Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT

Person Annotations

1927

Benét, Rosemary Carr (1898-1962). American poet and editor.Born in Chicago, IL, Rosemary Carr received her BA in English from the University of Chicago in 1918 and subsequently studied at the École Normale Supérieure de Sèvres in Paris, France. While in Paris, she wrote for both the Chicago Tribune and the London Daily Mail and met the poet Stephen Vincent Benét, who was studying at the Sorbonne. They married in 1921 and had three children. By 1930, they permanently moved to New York City and coauthored several works, including A Book of Americans (1933), a collection of poems for children, and “Willa Cather: Civilized and Very American” (1940), an interview published in the New York Herald Tribune. After Stephen died of a heart attack on March 13, 1943, Rosemary continued to write poetry and also served on the editorial board of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

2108

Benét, Stephen Vincent (1898-1943). American poet. Born in Bethlehem, PA, Stephen Vincent Benét received both his BA and his MA from Yale University in 1919 and 1920 respectively and subsequently moved to Paris, France, where he studied fiction and poetry at the Sorbonne. While in Paris, he met American journalist and poet Rosemary Carr. They married in 1921 and had three children. In 1928, Stephen published John Brown’s Body, an epic historical poem about the Civil War, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry the following year. By 1930, the Benéts permanently moved to New York City and coauthored several works, including A Book of Americans (1933), a collection of poems for children, and “Willa Cather: Civilized and Very American” (1940), an interview published in the New York Herald Tribune.

Place Annotations

New York, New York, United States