Young People's Pride a Novel

by Stephen Vincent Benét

Excerpt from Young People's Pride a Novel
It is one of Johnny Chipman's parties at the Harlequin Club, and as usual the people the other people have been asked to meet are late and as usual Johnny is looking hesitatingly around at those already collected with the nervous kindliness of an absent-minded menagerie-trainer who is trying to make a happy family out of a wombat, a porcupine, and two small Scotch terriers because they are all very nice and he likes them all and he can't quite remember at the moment just where he got hold of any of them. This evening he has been making an omelet of youngests.
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324 pages, Paperback

First published October 26, 2012

About the author

Stephen Vincent Benét, best known brother of William Rose Benét, also wrote John Brown's Body , his narrative poem of Civil War, in 1928. See John Brown.

A mother bore Stephen Vincent Benét into a military family. His father and Laura Benét, his sibling, also widely appreciated literature.

Benét attended Yale University and published Five Men and Pompey in 1915 and The Drug-Shop , collection, in 1917. A year of military service interrupted his studies; he worked as a cipher clerk in the same department as James Grover Thurber. He submitted his third volume of in place of a thesis, and Yale graduated him in 1919.

Stephen Vincent Benét published The Beginning of Wisdom , his first novel, in 1921. Benét then moved to France to continue his studies at the Sorbonne and returned to the United States in 1923 with the Rosemary Carr, his new wife.

Benét succeeded in many different literary forms, which included novels, short stories, screenplays, radio broadcasts, and a libretto for an opera, which Douglas Moore based on "The Devil and Daniel Webster." For his most famous long work, which interweaves historical and fictional characters to relate important events, from the raid on Harper's Ferry to surrender of Robert Edward Lee at Appomattox, he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1929.

During lifetime, Benét received the story prize of O. Henry, the Roosevelt Medal, and a second Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for the posthumously-published Western Star, the first part of an epic, based on American history. At the age of 44 years, Benét suffered a heart attack and died in New York City.

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading and enjoying a poetry collection and then a short story by this author, I wanted to read this novel to learn how he handled himself in that format. Written in 1922, Young People's Pride gives a glimpse into the lives of three young men just after WWI.

Three? Actually two men are the main focus of the story, Peter is mostly the person who invites others out to the family home. Ted and Oliver are the ones we learn the most about. All three were friends at college, but Ted and Oliver were in France during WWI and are now putting their lives back together. Oliver wants to be a writer, Ted is finishing his final year at law school.

Oliver is engaged to Nancy, but she is in St. Louis and he is in New York City. It has been eight months now and he is not anywhere closer to being able to provide for her than he was when they got engaged. He is fretting over all the concerns of a long-distance relationship.

Ted is not involved with anyone, but he is very interested in Peter's sister Elinor. Ted has had a harder time readjusting to normal life, plus he still struggles with nerves from unspecified events during the war. Add to that the idea that since he had an encounter in Paris, he feels he is now soiled and would not be worthy of any 'pure' girl, and you've got one messed up dude.

Also add a femme fatale called 'Mrs. Severance', who takes an interest in our Ted; Nancy's meddling mother; and the man who turns out to be 'Mr. Severance', and you have a complex mix of characters swirling around creating a bit of havoc in each other's lives.

I liked the story, except for a time or three when Benet got too poetic for his own good. I guessed who 'Mr. Severance' was, but not until about three-quarters of the way through, and I was almost as surprised as Oliver was when he found out. A wonderfully real episode was the family dinner in Chapter 9; and another type of dinner in Chapters 38 through 41 was hold-your-breath dramatic and hilariously funny all at once, which is a pretty slick trick.

This is not a long book, even with the 49 chapters (they were nearly all very short) and it was a quick read. But I do plan to go back some time and see if those overly poetic bits still annoy me when I am not in such a rush to find out What Happens Next.

[Adrienne]

This was a bit hard to get into, but at the same time, I finished it very quickly. It was very fast moving, despite being very wordy. In some ways it reminded me of the Great Gatsby, with the wordsy musings on life, and the lovely metaphors.It definitely had a different feel than the other books, most likely because it was chiefly a book about young men, written by a man. It was a very young book, all about the young men trying to make it in life, trying to reach their dreams and deal with money problems and figuring out what love is. I enjoyed the banter between the guys, and the book had some beautiful phrasing in it. A lot of the character's problems were also recognizable to me, showing how little people really change.