Glamour

by Stephen Vincent Benét

I USED to read quite a lot of books when I was younger, but now they just make me sore. Marian keeps on bringing them back from the lending library and, occasionally, I'll pick one up and read a few chapters, but sooner or later you're bound to strike something that makes you sick. I don't mean dirt or anything—just foolishness, and people acting the way they never act. Of course, the books she reads are mostly love stories. I suppose they're the worst kind.

17 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 21, 2013

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

[Classic reverie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been wanting to read Stephen Vincent Benet, ever since I heard his classic short story, "Elementals" on OTR, Old Time Radio. I will post a link to that below, there are several radio versions of that story. I have not been able to get it on my Kindle and I sure hope to at some point but it all depends on the powers to be, if they will be so kind. Why that story is something I really want to read, well listen and you might see why a romantic would find it fascinating.

So on to my first Benet read, "Glamour" is a bildungsroman short story about a young man who moves to Brooklyn and has high hopes in writing a book. He finds a boarding house in the North with the owner and her girls who have migrated from the South. The young man finds his life there nothing like he has ever known and gets caught up in the atmosphere which is very day dreaming producing. As all "coming to age" stories have a feeling of one being quite different after the experience and this rang true here. "Glamour" that is seen in one's youth is never quite the same when one grows older.

There are earlier versions too.
https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com...