Robert Penn Warren

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Image:Warren robert penn.jpg 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, Warren is considered by some to be one of the most underappreciated major American authors.

1 Life
2 Career
3 Bibliography
4 External links

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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. Married Eleanor Clark (July 1913-1997) 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.

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Career

Image:RobertPennWarren.png 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 December 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.

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