The poet John Brown's Body was written by Stephen Vincent Benet, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet and short story writer. Benet was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1898 and died in 1943. He is best known for his narrative poem John Brown's Body, which was published in 1928 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1929. The poem tells the story of the Civil War and its aftermath from the perspective of a Confederate soldier.