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Robert Penn Warren
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Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 - September 15, 1989)
was an American poet and writer.
He 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. at Oxford University in England in 1930.
Penn 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.
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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.
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).
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 Roseanna Warren, were in
attendance.
Works of Robert Penn Warren
At Heaven's Gate (1943)
All the King's Men (1946)
Promises: Poems (1954 – 1956)
Now and Then
John Brown: The Making of a Martyr
Thirty-six Poems
Night Rider
Eleven Poems on the Same Theme
Selected Poems, 1923 – 1943
Blackberry Winter
The Circus in the Attic
World Enough and Time
Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices
Band of Angels
Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South
Selected Essays
The Cave
You, Emprerors, and Others: Poems 1957 – 1960
The Legacy of the Civil War
Wilderness
Flood
Who Speaks for the Negro?
Selected Poems: New and Old 1923 – 1966
Incarnations: Poems 1966 – 1968
Christmas Gift 1938
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