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Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 - September 15, 1989) was an American poet and novelist. While most famous from the success of his novel All the King's Men (1946), Warren is considered by some to be one of the most underappreciated major American authors.
Life
Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky and graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1925 and the University of California, Berkeley in 1926. He later attended Yale University and obtained his B. Litt. as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England in 1930. That same year he married Emma Brescia, from whom he divorced in 1951. He then married Eleanor Clark in 1952. They had two children, Rosanna Phelps Warren (b. July 1953) and Gabriel Penn Warren (b.July 1955). Though his works strongly reflect Southern themes and mindset, Warren lived the latter part of his life in Fairfield, Connecticut and Stratton, Vermont. He died in 1989 of complications from bone cancer.
Career
While still an undergraduate at Vanderbilt, he became associated with the group of poets there known as the Fugitives, and somewhat later, during the early 1930s, Warren and some of the same writers 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).
Warren won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his best known work, the novel All the King's Men. He won Pulitzer Prizes in poetry in 1958 for Promises: Poems 1954-1956, and in 1979 for Now and Then. All the King's Men became a very successful film in 1949 and remake by director Steven Zaillian into a movie slated for release in September 2006.
In 1981, Warren was selected as a MacArthur Fellow and later was named as the first U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry on February 26, 1986. Warren was coauthor, with Cleanth Brooks, of Understanding Poetry, an influential literature textbook (which was followed by other similarly coauthored textbooks Understanding Fiction and Modern Rhetoric) written from what can be called a New Critic approach.
In April of 2005, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp to mark the 100th anniversary of Penn 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.
Bibliography
External links
- Robert Penn Warren page at poepts.org
- Robert Penn Warren page at KYLIT/Kentucky Literature
- Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University
- Robert Penn Warren site run by tloufrey@charter.net
- codec freemount3-DES100.htm Essay on Warren’s Evening Hawk
- Robert Penn Warren stamp at usps.com
- Interview in The Paris Review, 1957
1905 births | 1989 deaths | Literary critics | New Criticism | MacArthur Fellows | People from Kentucky | People from Vermont | American Rhodes scholars | American poets | National Medal of Arts recipients | American Poets Laureate
"Robert Penn Warren"