Stephen Vincent Benét

Stephen Vincent Benét’s lost epic “John Brown’s Body” envisions a nation sutured together after the Civil War, but fails to reckon with the war’s causes.

With help from the CIA, Paul Engle’s writing students battled Communism and eggheaded abstraction. The damage to writing still lingers.

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”— Robert E. Lee, at Fredericksburg