Benicia writer Donnell Rubay, who previously had written books about Jack London and John Muir, is about to release her newest biography about writer Stephen Vincent Benet, titled “With a Dream So Proud: The Life of Stephen Vincent Benet.” The launch party will take place at Carter’s Biz Cafes at the Commanding Officer’s Quarters, the same place Benet called home from 1905 to 1911.

When Benet was 7 years old, his father, Col. James Walker Benet, was a commander who was stationed at the Arsenal with his family. According to Rubay, Benet was initially homeschooled in Benicia so his parents could keep him close to home.

“He started to outgrow the homeschooling, and he also needed contact with other children which wasn’t available with him out in the Arsenal, so they sent him to boys’ school for about a year,” she said. “It was not a good experience for him, but he did really well academically.”

One of the things the elder Benet established in his time at the Quarters was a literary enclave for aspiring writers. This group featured several future successful writers, including not only Stephen and his older brother William and sister Laura, but also Pulitzer Prize-winning UC Berkeley professor Leonard Bacon, romance novelist Kathleen Thompson Norris and Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis, whose first novel “Hike and the Aeroplane” features a town called Santa Benicia.

Benet left an indelible legacy as a writer. His works include the short stories “By the Waters of Babylon” and “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” the Pulitzer-winning narrative poems “Western Star” and “John Brown’s Body” about the struggles of pre-Colonial America and the famed abolitionist who was hanged before the start of the Civil War, respectively. Additionally, his short story “The Sobbin’ Woman” was adapted into the movie musical “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” he was the first person to use the phrase “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee”— several decades before Dee Brown—, and he was quoted in speeches by such figures as John F. Kennedy.

Benet died of a heart attack in 1943 as many countries were in the midst of taking part in World War II. Still, Rubay said he did his part to inform the world of the injustices that were taking place.

“He felt very passionate about democracy and the freedoms we had in America, and he was very torn up about the war and the way the dictators were taking freedoms from other people,” she said. “He had articles published in magazines, work produced on the radio to tens of millions of listeners to try and get people in America to understand ‘There’s a problem over there in Europe, and we need to help them.’”

Rubay began doing work on the book shortly after she learned Benet had once lived in Benicia. One of the goals was to provide newer information to the public, as the only biography she knew of was published in 1958.

“Nobody in the present time is going to spend a lot of time with the book from 1958,” she said. “It was written for people of the ‘50s, who would have had more knowledge of people to begin with.”

Additionally, she feels a new book would provide readers with up-to-date information on Benet, including his influence on people like Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

One of the main sources Rubay used for the book was Benet’s son Tom, who she had first interviewed in the fall of 2001 and spoke with intermittently over the next 15 years until he died on Sept. 7 at the age of 89. Tom was a longtime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and Rubay provided him with a manuscript of her book before he passed.

“I wanted him to see it before it was finished,” she said.

Tom described the manuscript as “A sensitive, richly anecdotal account of the life of one of America’s leading authors.”

Tom also provided Rubay with a scrapbook that his aunt Laura had made of Stephen, which she was able to use extensively.

“He let me take it home and copy everything I wanted and add the articles from the time,” she said. “I was able to add a lot of tidbits to the book to help make it more interesting.”

“With a Dream So Proud” will be published on Saturday, Sept. 17. To coincide with the release, Benicia Literary Arts will be sponsoring a launch party at 11 a.m. at Carter’s Biz Cafes, located at 1 Commandants Lane. Rubay will be playing two YouTube videos of Benet’s poems set to music by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Steve Young— not to be confused with the City Council candidate or the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback. Rubay will also be explaining what Benet was like in person, which she hopes the book will be able to do as well.

“I would like them to feel like they’ve met Stephen, and that they could have known him,” she said. “I feel like to have known him would have been such a benefit because he was such a noble person.”

The book will be available at Bookshop Benicia, located at 636 First St.