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Poet Stephen Vincent Benet, 1929.
Credit: Image Donated by Corbis-Bettmann
In 1929, Stephen Vincent Benet won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his 15,000-line poem "John Brown's Body." After losing almost all of his money after the stock market crashed that same year, Benét used his writing to condemn what he considered threats to core American values, including the predatory wealth of American business.