Robert penn warren (1905-1989)

American novelist, poet, critic, and teacher who stressed the main­tenance of human dignity against corruption and abuse of power. He became the first poet laureate of the United States in 1986.

Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky in 1905. His father was a poetry-loving banker and his mother was a schoolteacher. He lost his chance for a naval career at Annapolis when he was hit in the left eye with a piece of coal thrown by his brother. He later lost his left eye in surgery.

Warren was educated at Vanderbilt University and the University of California and in 1930 received a Rhodes Scholarship for study at the University of Oxford. In 1935, along with Cleanth Brooks, Warren edited the literary journal the Southern Review which published provocative essays, as well as fiction by emerging southern writers such as Eudora Welty. Both belonged to the New Critics who stressed "close reading and interpretation of the texts." Both collaborated to write Understanding Poetry in 1938 and Understanding Fiction in 1943. Much of Warren's own prose and poetry grows out of his critical engagement with the history of the American South. Warren also held academic positions and worked as a teacher at Yale, Van­derbilt University, Southwestern College, and Louisiana State Uni­ver­sity. He also taught at the University of Minnesota (1942-1950) and Yale (1961-1973).

A man of remarkable energy and discipline, he managed to find time from his teaching and editing to write three novels. Two of these were never published, but the third, Night Rider, appeared in 1939. It was the first of ten, and its success with readers established his reputation well beyond the walls of the academy.

Warren's ten novels are unified in both locale and theme. They are works about the South and southerners and, while aspiring to transcend their time and place, are nonetheless marked by a southern particularity that is deliberate, insistent, and unmistakable. They fall into two groups: the first group is historical and evokes a lost world recaptured through the imaginative use of documentary evidence; the second group is contemporary and constitutes a history of Warren's own times.

The novels in the first group – World Enough and Time (1950), Band of Angels (1955), and Wilderness (1961) – were the result of three decades in which Warren said he "soaked" himself in American history. A biography published when he was twenty-five years old, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929), had signaled Warren's interest in the half-century leading to the Civil War. The three historical novels, set in that period, are marked by the judicious handling of evidence and the attention to detail characteristic of the scholarly historian.

The seven novels of the second group span Warren's own lifetime and follow one another in roughly chronological order. Night Rider is the world of his boyhood; At Heaven's Gate (1943) is the Nashville of his college years; All the King's Men (1946) is the Louisiana he knew as a young university teacher at Baton Rouge. The next three novels – The Cave (1959), Flood (1964), and Meet Me in the Green Glen (197l) – cover the years in his section of the South from just before World War II through the 1960s. His last novel, A Place to Come To (1976), is written in a spirit of summary. As he approaches old age, the hero, a professor of English, looks back with nostalgia over a career that spans three-quarters of a century, a period paralleling Warren's own life.

Among these works, All the King's Men was the most widely read and generated the strongest critical and popular reception. The novel chronicles the rise and fall of a homegrown fascist, Willie Stark, as told by one of his henchmen, Jack Burden. Its first readers praised its treatment of the political processes of democracy as practiced in the South of the 1930s. More recent studies have stressed its innovative structure and its philosophical subtlety. It is the novel in which Warren's special gifts are most in evidence – his sense of history, his inventive language, and his ability to dramatize a large cast of charac­ters against a vividly realized background. Generally conside­red his masterpiece, All the King’s Men won Warren the first of three Pulitzer prizes. Made into a play, a motion picture, and an opera, the novel was eventually translated into twenty languages.