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Warren Robert Penn
(1905—1989)
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic, and was a co-founder of The New Criticism. While most famous from the success of his novel All the King's Men (1946), Warren also won two Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry.
Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, graduated from Clarksville High School (TN), 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 from New College, Oxford, 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.
While still an undergraduate at Vanderbilt, Warren 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). The Agrarians are known for their romanticization of the Old South and conservative political leanings, but Warren's own liberal philosophy and support for racial integration distinguished him from most of the other members.
Warren won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his best known work, the novel All the King's Men, whose main character, Willie Stark, resembles the radical Louisiana populist Huey Pierce Long (1893-1935), whom Warren was able to observe closely while teaching at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge from 1933-42. Warren won Pulitzer Prizes in poetry in 1958 for Promises: Poems 1954-1956, and in 1979 for Now and Then. All the King's Men, starring Broderick Crawford, became a highly successful film, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1949. A 2006 re-make by director Steven Zaillian featured Sean Penn in the lead role as Willie Stark.
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 Critical approach.
USA, 2005, Robert Penn Warren
