Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 - September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic, the only person to have won the Pulitzer Prize in both fiction and poetry.

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) in 1968. Photo by Ephemera. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Robert Penn Warren
Born	April 24, 1905 Guthrie, Kentucky, United States
Died	September 15, 1989 (aged 84) Stratton, Vermont, United States
Occupation	Poet, novelist
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Vanderbilt University University of California at Berkeley Oxford University Yale University

Life

Overview

Warran was a founder of the New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He

Youth and education

Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, which is almost exactly on the state line, to Anna (Penn) and Robert Warren. Warren's mother's family had roots in Virginia, having given their name to the community of Penn's Store in Patrick County, Virginia.

He graduated from Clarksville High School in Clarksville, Tennessee; Vanderbilt University in 1925; and the University of California, Berkeley in 1926. While an undergraduate at Vanderbilt, Warren became associated with the group of poets there known as the Fugitives,

Warren later attended Yale University, and obtained his B. Litt. as a Rhodes Scholar from New College, Oxford, in England in 1930. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Italy during the rule of Benito Mussolini.

Career

In 1930 he began his teaching career at Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis, Tennessee.

During the early 1930s, Warren and some of the Fugitives formed a group known as the Southern Agrarians. He contributed "The Briar Patch" to the Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand along with 11 other Southern writers and poets (including fellow Vanderbilt poet/critics John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson). In "The Briar Patch" the young Warren defends racial segregation, in line with the traditionalist conservative political leanings of the Agrarian group, although Davidson deemed Warren's stances in the essay so progressive that he argued for excluding it from the collection.

However, Warren recanted these views in an article on the Civil Rights Movement, "Divided South Searches Its Soul", which appeared in the July 9, 1956 issue of Life magazine. A month later, Warren published an expanded version of the article as a small book titled Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South. He subsequently adopted a high profile as a supporter of racial integration. In 1965, he published Who Speaks for the Negro?, a collection of interviews with black civil rights leaders including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, thus further distinguishing his political leanings from the more conservative philosophies associated with fellow Agrarians such as Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and particularly Davidson. Warren's interviews with civil rights leaders are at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky.

Warren was co-author, with Cleanth Brooks, of Understanding Poetry, an influential literature textbook. It was followed by other similarly co-authored textbooks, including Understanding Fiction, which was praised by Southern Gothic and Roman Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor, and Modern Rhetoric, which adopted what can be called a New Critical perspective.

Private life

Warren was secretly married in the summer of 1929 to Emma Brescia until their divorce in 1951. His 2nd marriage was in 1952 to Eleanor Clark, with whom he had 2 children, Rosanna Phelps Warren (born 1953) and Gabriel Penn Warren (born 1955). He lived the latter part of his life in Fairfield, Connecticut, and then in Stratton, Vermont where he died of complications from bone cancer. He is buried at Stratton, Vermont.

Writing

His best known work is the novel All the King's Men, whose main character, Willie Stark, resembles the radical populist governor of Louisiana, Huey Pierce Long (1893-1935), whom Warren was able to observe while teaching at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge from 1933 to 1942.

Recognition

The Robert Penn Warren Birthplace Museum. Photo by Randy Pritchett. Licensed under Creative Commons, Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Warren served as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, in 1944 and 1945.

He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the novel for his 1946 novel All the King's Men.

Warren won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1958 for Promises: Poems, 1954-1956, and again in 1979 for Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978. He is the only writer ever to have won the Pulitzer in both fiction and poetry.

In 1974, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Warren for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Warren's lecture was entitled "Poetry and Democracy" (subsequently published under the title Democracy and Poetry).

In 1980, Warren was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter. In 1981, he was selected as a MacArthur Fellow. He was named as the inaugural U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry on February 26, 1986. In 1987, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

At his request, a memorial marker to Warren is situated in the Warren family gravesite in Guthrie, Kentucky.

In April 2005, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp to mark the 100th anniversary of Warren's birth. Introduced at the post office in his native Guthrie, it depicts the author as he appeared in a 1948 photograph, with a background scene of a political rally designed to evoke the setting of All the King's Men. His son and daughter, Gabriel and Rosanna Warren, were in attendance.

Vanderbilt University houses the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, which is sponsored by the College of Arts and Science. It began its programs in January 1988, and in 1989 received a $480,000 Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The center promotes "interdisciplinary research and study in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences."

In popular culture

All the Kings Men

All the King's Men was made into a highly successful film, starring Broderick Crawford, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1949. A 2006 film adaptation by writer/director Steven Zaillian featured Sean Penn as Willie Stark and Jude Law as Jack Burden.

The opera Willie Stark by Carlisle Floyd, based on All the King's Men, was premiered in 1981.

Publications

Poetry

• Thirty-six Poems. Alcestis Press, 1936.
• Eleven Poems on the Same Theme. New Directions, 1942.
• Selected Poems, 1923-1943. Harcourt, 1944.
• Brother to Dragons: A tale in verse and voices (long poem). New York: Random House, 1953.
  • Brother to Dragons: A tale in verse and voices – A New Version. New York: Random House, 1979.
• Promises: Poems, 1954-1956. New York: Random House, 1957.
• You, Emperors, and Others: Poems, 1957-1960. New York: Random House, 1960.
• Selected PoemsN New and old, 1923-1966. New York: Random House, 1966.
• Incarnations: Poems, 1966-1968. New York: Random House, 1968.
• Audubon: A Vision (long poem). New York: Random House, 1969.
• Or Else: Poem/Poems, 1968-1974. New York: Random House, 1974.
• Selected Poems, 1923-1976. New York: Random House, 1977.
• Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978. New York: Random House, 1978.
• Being Here: Poetry, 1977-1980. New York: Random House, 1980.
• Rumor Verified: Poems, 1979-1980. New York: Random House, 1981.
• Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (long poem). New York: Random House, 1983.
• New & Selected Poems, 1923-1985. New York: Random House, 1985.
• Collected Poems (edited by John Burt). Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

Novels

• Night Rider. Houghton, 1939.
• At Heaven's Gate. Harcourt, 1943.
• All the King's Men. Harcourt, 1946.
• World Enough and Time. New York: Random House, 1950.
• Band of Angels. New York: Random House, 1955.
• The Cave. New York: Random House, 1959.
• Wilderness: A tale of the Civil War. New York: Random House, 1961.
• Flood: A romance of Our time. New York: Random House, 1964.
• Meet Me in the Green Glen. New York: Random House, 1971.
• A Place to Come To. New York: Random House, 1977.

Short fiction

• Blackberry Winter. Cummington, MA: Cummington Press, 1946.
• The Circus in the Attic, and other stories. Harcourt, 1947.

Non-fiction

Textbooks

• An Approach to Literature (with Cleanth Brooks & John Thibaut Purser). Louisiana State University Press, 1936; Crofts, 1939; Prentice-Hall, 1975.
• Understanding Poetry (with Cleanth Brooks). New York: Holt, 1938; 4th edition, 1976.
• Understanding Fiction (with Cleanth Brooks). Crofts, 1943; 2nd Edition, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959.
• Fundamentals of Good Writing: A handbook of modern rhetoric (with Cleanth Brooks). Harcourt, 1950; 2nd edition, 1958; 4th edition, 1979.
• American Literature: The makers and the making (with Cleanth Brooks & R.W.B. Lewis. New York: St. Martin's, 1974.

Essays

• Homage to Theodore Dreiser: On the centennial of his birth. New York: Random House, 1971.
• John Greenleaf Whittier's Poetry: An appraisal and a selection. University of Minnesota Press, 1971.
• Selected Essays. New York: Random House, 1958.
• Portrait of a Father. University Press of Kentucky, 1988.
• Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back. University Press of Kentucky, 1980.
• New and Selected Essays. New York: Random House, 1989.

History/biography

• John Brown: The making of a martyr. Payson & Clarke, 1929; Scholarly Press, 1970.
• Segregation: The inner conflict in the south. New York: Random House, 1956.
• The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the centennial. New York: Random House, 1961.
• Who Speaks for the Negro. New York: Random House, 1965.

Juvenile

• Remember the Alamo. New York: Random House, 1958.
• The Gods of Mount Olympus. New York: Random House, 1959.
• How Texas Won Her Freedom. San Jacinto Museum of History, 1959.

Robert Penn Warren reads Love Recognized

Collected editions

• A Robert Penn Warren Reader. New York: Random House, 1987.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy RobertPennWarren.com.

'Evening Hawk' by Robert Penn Warren (You Come Too Poetry Series)

Plays

• All the King's Men: A play (1960).

See also

• List of U.S. poets
• List of literary critics

True Love Robert Penn Warren, 1905 - 1989

References

• Joseph Blotner, Robert Penn Warren: A biography. New York: Random House, 1997.
• Encyclopedia of Kentucky. New York, New York: Somerset Publishers. 1987. pp. 188–189. ISBN 0403099811. 
• Joseph R. Millichap, Robert Penn Warren after Audubon:The work of aging and the quest for transcendence in his later poetry. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2009 ISBN 978-0-8071-3456-6

Fonds

• Guide to the Robert Penn Warren Photograph Collection at the University of Kentucky
• Guide to the Robert Penn Warren papers, 1916-1967 at the University of Kentucky.

External links

Poems

• Robert Penn Warren at the Poetry Foundation
• Robert Penn Warren profile & 8 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• Robert Penn Warren: Online Poems
• Robert Penn Warren at PoemHunter (8 poems)

Audio / video

• Robert Penn Warren at YouTube

Books

• Robert Penn Warren at Amazon.com

About

• Robert Penn Warren in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Robert Penn Warren at NNDB.
• Yale biography
• Robert Penn Warren bio at The Fellowship of Southern Writers
• Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) at Modern American Poetry
• Robert Penn Warren page at KYLIT/Kentucky Literature
• Robert Penn Warren website.
• Eugene Walter and Ralph Ellison (Spring-Summer 1957). "Robert Penn Warren, The Art of Fiction No. 18". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4868/the-art-of-fiction-no-18-robert-penn-warren. 

Etc.

• Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University