"The Devil and Daniel Webster" is American myth; it remains the foundational contribution by an American artist to the Faust myth. Stephen Vincent Benet originally published the short story in the Saturday Evening Post in 1936. The next year it was republished in Benet’s collection Thirteen O’Clock and also earned him the O. Henry Award in recognition of the best short story of the year. Just one year after receiving one of the most prestigious literary awards given to an American, it became clear that that not only would Benet be making a contribution to myth, he had created something that would take on a mythic quality itself.
Rare, indeed, is the short story that is adapted into an opera. Even rarer is the short story first adapted into an opera, then a stage play and then a film all within five years of publication. Perhaps there was just something about the desperation of a farmer so unlucky he was willing to sell his soul to the devil just to briefly taste a little success that touched Americans struggling with the roughest period of the Great Depression in a deeper way that it might have otherwise. One thing is for certain: more Americans probably came to know the story of “The Devil and Daniel Webster” through one medium or another better than any other short story of the period.
That immediacy irrefutably helped elevate the story to a mythic position shared by few works of short fiction that are not working within a specific genre. The lasting power of Americans to connect with a tale that by now few may actually have read can be exhibited by sheer volume of adaptations that continued to pop up throughout the 20th century. In addition to another feature film, the story has been made into TV movies and episodes of anthology shows. An animated film changed the title to “The Devil and Daniel Mouse” with appropriate mammalian alterations in character. Throughout the 1930’s and 1940’s, radio listeners were regularly treated to dramatizations and brand new stage version appeared in the early 1970’s. “The Devil and Daniel Webster” has proven especially fit for satire in the age of irony and has been used as the inspiration for episodes of TV shows covering the gamut from science fiction to westerns, most notably a classic early Treehouse of Horror segment on the Simpsons in which Ned Flanders is the devil to whom Homer Simpson sold his soul in exchange for a donut.
