Robert Penn Warren

Abstract

The life of Robert Penn Warren (b. 1905–d. 1989) spanned most of the 20th century, so that his varied and voluminous work engaged international modernism in many ways that evolved as regional and national responses to it. Born, raised, and educated in Kentucky and Tennessee, Warren came of age among the then developing Fugitives, Agrarians, and New Critics at Vanderbilt University. After graduating in 1925, advanced study at California, Yale, and Oxford (the last as a Rhodes Scholar) prepared Warren for a distinguished academic career at Louisiana State University, the University of Minnesota, and Yale University. In his years at LSU, Warren helped to launch the Southern Review, and he also edited influential literature text books with his friend and colleague Cleanth Brooks. Warren was determined to be a writer though, and his first volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction appeared in those same years. His great novel, All the King’s Men (1946), marked the end of his literary apprenticeship, especially after it won the Pulitzer Prize. This new national status precipitated a midlife crisis that ended Warren’s troubled first marriage, began his long tenure at Yale, and led to new experiments in drama, cultural criticism, and narrative poetry. Brother to Dragons (1953), subtitled A Tale in Verse and Voices, proves a pivotal effort in which the murder of a slave by Thomas Jefferson’s nephews is related to the writer’s regional legacy. Marriage to fellow author Eleanor Clark, the births of daughter Rosanna and son Gabriel, and a sabbatical trip to Italy brought Warren to an open, personal, and lyrical style in Promises (1957), which won the first of his two Pulitzers for poetry. Warren continued to publish well-reviewed novels (ten in all throughout his career), but his more direct engagement with social issues, especially America’s conflicted racial heritage, also increased his recognition. During these same decades, Warren’s childhood memories and mature visions became powerful poetry that he gathered into well-received new collections (fourteen in all throughout his career). Many critics now believe his poems in the six volumes published between 1974 and 1985 will remain Warren’s lasting literary achievement. This judgment is supported by frequent honors in Warren’s later years, including another Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection Now and Then (1978) and his appointment as America’s first official Poet Laureate in 1986. Warren’s death in 1989 and his centennial in 2005 renewed interest in his life and in his writing.