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Robert Penn Warren
was in Guthrie, Kentucky in 1905 and remained a resident of the
South until his late thirties. It would be the South, however, that
would always rise to the surface of his writing, and the spirit of
the South that would evoke the passionate and poetic language that
became synonymous with his name.
In 1920 the course of his life
changed—Warren lost sight in one eye when his young brother, Thomas,
accidentally hit him with a stone. Prior to the accident, he
was awaiting an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. Forced to forego
his aspirations for the Naval Academy, Warren enrolled at Vanderbilt
University in Nashville, Tennessee to study engineering.
While
attending Vanderbilt, Warren’s roommate,
Allen Tate, introduced him
to a group of young writers, men brought together by their interest
in writing poetry and a nostalgia for the culture of the South.
Also included in this group was one of Warren’s teachers John Crowe
Ransom. Both Tate and Ransom were at the beginning of their writing
careers. The group published a magazine called The Fugitive,
and though they never aspired to create an intellectual movement,
they did manage to sway the young, impressionable Warren. By the
time he graduated from Vanderbilt in 1925, he was committed to his
writing.
He went on to
study at the University of California and Yale University and in
1928 he was named a Rhodes Scholar allowing him to enter Oxford University. In 1930 he returned from England and with
a degree in English literature. Quickly thereafter, he married Emma Brescia, and accepted a position as instructor of English at
Southwestern College in Memphis, Tennessee.
After one year at Southwestern, he accepted an offer from his
alma mater Vanderbilt. He taught there for three years before taking
another position at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. From
1934-1942, he established a reputation as a great poet and an
influential academic. He helped found the
Southern Review,
and wrote three novels during this time. Two of these were never
published, but the third,
Night Rider was published in 1939.
The success of Night Rider established his literary standing and
gave him a name beyond academia.
In 1950 Warren moved to New Haven, Connecticut to accept a
professorship of playwriting at Yale University. He and Emma
divorced and he quickly remarried Eleanor Clark in 1952. They had
two children. Another change was his attempt to return to his
poetry. He collected his early works in
Selected Poems,
1923-1943 (1944), but he was unable to produce new poetry.
Instead, he published an autobiographical narrative in verse,
Brother to Dragons
(1953), Finally, in 1957 he published,
Promises, Poems 1954-1956
(1957).
In all, Warren wrote ten novels. All of his novels deal with the
South and southerners. In chronological order, the novels include:
Night Rider
(1929);
At Heaven's Gate
(1943);
All the
King's Men (1946);
World Enough and Time (1950);
Band of Angels (1955);
The Cave (1959);
Wilderness
(1961);
Flood (1964);
Meet Me in the Green
Glen (197l);
A Place to Come To
(1976).
Among these works,
All the
King's Men was his most popular
with readers and critics alike. The widely read novel chronicles the
rise and fall of Willie Stark, addressing the political
processes of democracy as practiced in the South of the 1930s.
In 1986 he was named poet laureate.
Robert Penn Warren died in 1989 in Vermont.
For additional books by and about Robert Penn Warren
(click here).
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