A book of Americans

Stephen Vincent Benét ( bə-NAY; July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943) was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. He wrote a book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown's Body, published in 1928, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and for the short stories "The Devil and Daniel Webster", published in 1936, and "By the Waters of Babylon", published in 1937. In 2009, Library of America selected his story "The King of the Cats", published in 1929, for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub.