Robert Penn Warren

1905-1989

Robert Penn Warren, an American writer, critic and scholar, was born in Guthric, Kentucky State, and educated at the universities of Vanderbilt, of California, and the Yale University.

Robert Penn Warren is identified with the Southern group of writers. His concern with the regional background was especially evident in his early works. During the late 1920's the group published the Fugitive, a bi-monthly little magazine, which contained poetry and criticism championing regionalism and attacking the highcaste brahmins at the old South. The "New Critics", as they called themselves, sought to concentrate attention on the literary opus as an autonomous work of art, rather than on the age in which it was written, or the author's personality and his entourage. The writers of the modern South lived in "another country", the country of fiction, and not that to which they belonged by birth.

Penn Warren's early reputation was made with his poetry. His several collections of verse are:

"Thirty Six Poems" (1935), "Eleven Poems on the Same Theme" (1942), "Selected Poems" (1923 1943), "Brother to Dragons" (1935), a drama in verse, "Promises, Poems'" (1954-1957), which was awarded the Pulitzer prize. Penn Warren's prose fiction won him a wider audience. Its leading keynote revolves about a similar theme: man's private responsibility for his public actions. His first novel "Night Rider" (1939) is a story of Kentucky Tobacco War of 1904 between the growers and the manufacturers; the plot of "At Heavens Gate" (1943) was suggested by "the career of Luke Lee, a corrupt Tennessee businessman and politician". [99]

Penn Warren's best and most popular novel "All the King's Men" (1946) is an account of vicious politics of a Southern State governor. It won its author the Pulitzer prize. "The Circus in the Attic" (1947) is a volume containing 2 novelettes and 12 short stories; the theme of "World Enough and Time" (1950) was borrowed from the newspaper chronicle, a description of a mysterious murder in Frankfort; "The Cave" (1959) and "Wilderness" (1961) are historical novels of the civil War period.

Robert Penn Warren is also well known as a critic, scholar and teacher. He taught at Louisiana State University and the universities of Michigan and Yale. He composed textbooks that were most influential in shaping the teaching of English in America.