• Occupation: Writer, Actor
• Active: '40s-'50s, '70s-'80s, 2000s
• Major Genres: Drama
• Career Highlights: All the King's Men, Band of Angels, Assault on Precinct 13
• First Major Screen Credit: All the King's Men (1949)

Biography

Distinguished American author Robert Penn Warren co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of his political novel All the King's Men (1949). He has also had a couple of his other novels adapted to the screen including Band of Angels (1957). ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

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Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), American man of letters, was dedicated to art as a way of exploring the meaning of contemporary existence.

Writer and poet Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) was born in Guthrie, Kentucky on April 24, 1905. He twice received the Pulitzer Prize: one for fiction in 1947 and another for poetry in 1958. He earned his baccalaureate at Vanderbilt University in 1925 where he knew John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and other Southern Agrarian poets who published the Fugitive magazine (1922-1925). His essay, I'll Take My Stand, published by Fugitive in 1930, was among the most persuasive and reasonable defenses of the South's cultural and social heritage to that date.

After receiving his master's in 1927 from the University of California, Warren attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship and took his doctorate in 1930. Pondy Woods and Other Poems (1930) was his first published volume of verse. During the 1930s, he was managing editor with Cleanth Brooks of the Southern Review. Warren taught at Southwestern College, Vanderbilt, Louisiana State University, University of Minnesota, and Yale University after 1950.

Warren's fiction, usually historically based, considers the implications of man's initiation into awareness of the potential evil in himself and the world. It has much in common with the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

His pre-eminent work was All the King's Men (1946), ostensibly a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of the Louisiana demagogue Huey Long. Warren's central theme throughout the book was man's capacity for evil. This book garnered the first of his two Pulitzer Prize awards. World Enough and Time (1950), based on a famous 19th-century murder case, examines the conjunctions between idealism and evil, innocence and guilt. Wilderness (1961), a Civil War tale, describes a youth's acceptance of moral responsibility.

Although Warren's early poems were examples of the so-called New Critical school (as presented in his text book, Understanding Poetry, written with Cleanth Brooks in 1938), his later verse was more romantic and transcendental, reflecting the influence of American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. "The Ballad of Billie Potts" retells a folk legend involving the unwitting murder of a child by his parents. Brother to Dragons (1953), a book-length "tale in verse and voices, " tells of the wanton murder of an African American slave by Thomas Jefferson's two nephews in 1811. Jefferson represents the idealist enmeshed in evil and the institution of slavery. Warren himself appears as the seeker of some solution to universal moral complicity that slavery needed to survive. Promises: Poems 1954 to 1956 (1957) won for Warren his second Pulitzer Prize.

Warren's Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956) argued that only by coming to terms with the common humanity of the African Americans could the South ever realize its ideals. The new poems in New and Selected Poems (1966) provide conclusive evidence that Warren's concerns changed considerably after his New Critical period. Homage to Emerson: On a Night Flight to New York entertains the possibility that Emerson's faith may still be relevant. Other works by Warren include the novels Night Rider (1939), Band of Angels (1955), The Cave (1959), and Flood (1964). He also published Selected Essays (1958) and Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965). Later works by Warren include such volumes of poetry as Selected Poems, 1923-1975 (1976), Being Here: Poetry, 1977-1980 (1980), Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (1983), and New and Selected Poems, 1923-1985 (1985); works of fiction include MeetMe in the Green Glen (1971) and A Place to Come Home To (1977). His nonfiction pieces include Democracy and Poetry (1975), Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back (1980), Portrait of a Father (1988), and New and Selected Essays (1989). Warren also wrote the play Ballad of a Sweet Dream of Peace: An Easter Charade (produced in 1981).

Warren died of cancer September 15, 1989, in Stratton, Vermont. During his long and respected career, he was the recipient of many awards, including his two Pulitzer Prizes; Caroline Sinkler Prize, Poetry Society of America (1936, 1937, and 1938); Shelley Memorial Prize for Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1942); National Book Award for Promises: Poems 1954 to 1956 (1958); Bollingen Prize in Poetry, Yale University, 1967 for Selected Poems: New and Old, 1923-1966 (1967); National Medal for Literature for Audubon: A Vision (1970); Copernicus Prize, American Academy of Poets (1976); Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1980; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination for Being Here: Poetry, 1977-1980 (1980); named first Poet Laureate of the United States (1986); National Medal of Arts (1987); and numerous honorary degrees from such institutions as University of Louisville (1949), Swarthmore College (1958), Yale University (1959), Harvard University (1973), Johns Hopkins University (1977), Oxford University (1983), and Arizona State University.

Further Reading

An excellent critical study is Victor H. Strandberg, A Colder Fire: The Poetry of Robert Penn Warren (1965). Other studies include Leonard Casper, Robert Penn Warren (1960); Charles H. Bohner, Robert Penn Warren (1965); and the section on Warren in Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets, from the Puritans to the Present (1968). A useful critical anthology is John Lewis Longley, Jr., ed., Robert Penn Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays (1965); Connelly, Thomas L., et al., A Southern Renascence Man: Views of Robert Penn Warren, Louisiana State University Press (1984); Koppelman, Robert S., Robert Penn Warren's Modernist Spirituality, University of Missouri Press (1995).

For more information on Robert Penn Warren, visit Britannica.com.

1905–89, American novelist, poet, and critic, b. Guthrie, Ky., grad. Vanderbilt Univ. 1925; M.A., Univ. of California 1927; B.Litt., Oxford 1930. At Vanderbilt he became associated with John Crowe Ransom and the group of Southern agrarian poets who made the Fugitive (1922–25) an important literary magazine. He was managing editor with Cleanth Brooks of the Southern Review. Warren first gained recognition as a poet. His early verse was much influenced by the metaphysical poets, but his later poetry is simpler and more regional. Among his volumes of poetry are Thirty-six Poems (1935); Brother to Dragons (1953; Pulitzer), a long, dramatic poem; Promises (1957; Pulitzer), Selected Poems: New and Old (1966), Incarnations (1968), Audubon: A Vision (1969), Or Else (1974), and New and Selected Poems 1923–1985 (1985). Warren's most famous novel is All the King's Men (1946; Pulitzer), which concerns the rise to power of a political demagogue resembling Huey Long. Among his other novels are World Enough and Time (1950), The Cave (1959), Wilderness (1961), Flood (1964), Meet Me in the Green Glen (1971), and A Place to Come To (1977). His other works include a collection of short stories, The Circus in the Attic (1948), and Selected Essays (1958). In 1986 he became the first poet laureate of the United States.

Bibliography

See biography by J. Blotner (1997); correspondence with C. Brooks (1998), ed. by J. A. Grimshaw, Jr.; studies by C. Bohner (1964, rev. ed. 1981), J. Justus (1981), and K. Snipes (1984).

(1905-1989)

1935	Thirty-Six Poems. Warren's first collection combines folk narratives drawn from his native Kentucky as well as verses influenced by the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, examining the relation between humanity and nature. Warren was born in Kentucky and while a student at Vanderbilt was associated with the group of writers who called themselves the Fugitives.
1939	Night Rider. Warren's first novel concerns the Kentucky Tobacco Wars of the early twentieth century, which took place between the growers and the manufacturers.
1942	Eleven Poems on the Same Theme. The collection traces a progress toward self-knowledge and contains one of Warren's finest poems, "End of Season."
1943	At Heaven's Gate. Warren's second novel concerns a shady Southern financier who gains great power within his state but loses his daughter.
1944	Selected Poems, 1923-1943. Warren's selections from his poetry of the past two decades show his development from an early intricate, metaphysical style to simpler narrative and regional idioms, as well as growth in subtle intelligence, emotional precision, and skilled craftsmanship.
1946	All the King's Men. Warren's most popular work and one of the enduring American political novels tells the story of a Huey Long-like Southern demagogue, Willie Stark, who features a complex blend of strengths and weaknesses and is corrupted by power.
1947	Circus in the Attic, and Other Stories. This collection of stories with rural and small-town settings demonstrates Warren's skill in detailed observation and the rendering of the rhythms and idiom of Southern speech. It includes his first published story, "Prime Leaf" (1930), and what many consider his best, "Blackberry Winter," a tale of lost innocence.
1950	World Enough and Time. Warren's most ambitious novel is a fictionalized version of the sensational nineteenth-century Beauchamp-Sharp murder case in Kentucky, in which a modern researcher probes the evidence for the key to understanding the complex tragedy.
1953	Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices. Based on an actual incident, Warren's ambitious narrative poem treats the murder of a slave in 1811 by Thomas Jefferson's nephews. In it Jefferson deals with disillusion with his humanistic idealism and confronts his attitudes toward slavery. Robert Lowell considers the poem "superior to any of the longer works of Browning," and Randall Jarrell calls it "an event, a great one."
1955	Band of Angels. Warren's complex Civil War-era exploration of race and personal identity concerns the pampered daughter of a Kentucky plantation owner who learns that her mother was a slave and who is herself sold to a man in New Orleans, beginning a struggle for freedom that is finally realized after years of marriage to a Union captain.
1956	Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South. Warren presents a survey of Southern opinion on the issue. Who Speaks for the Negro? would follow in 1965, based on Warren's interviews with prominent black leaders.
1957	Promises: Poems 1954-1956. Warren's collection, which marks a shift in style from narrative to personal introspection, receives both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It includes the powerful sequence "Ballad of a Sweet Dream of Peace."
1959	The Cave. Based on an actual incident, the novel uses the plight of a young Tennessee hillbilly who becomes trapped in a cave to study the reaction of his rescuers and their community. The novel is unusual in that the object of the rescue is never shown.
1960	You, Emperors, and Others: Poems, 1957-1960. The collection contains Warren's moving sequence "Mortmain," about the death of his father.
1961	Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War. Warren's novel follows the career of a Bavarian Jew who joins the Union army during the Civil War. Warren also publishes a volume of essays, The Legacy of the Civil War, in which he asserts that the Civil War "holds in suspension the great unresolved issues of our society--justice, tolerance, true brotherhood, understanding, and charity."
1964	Flood: A Romance of Our Times. Warren's novel is a group portrait of residents of a small Tennessee community that is to be flooded when a dam is completed.
1968	Incarnations: Poems, 1966-1968. The collection shows the poet's experiments with typography and poetic diction. The following year he would produce the verse ballad Audubon: A Vision (1969), chronicling the life of the ornithologist and painter John James Audubon.
1971	Meet Me in the Green Glen. Warren's novel depicts a domestic tragedy surrounding a young Sicilian man's affair with a Tennessee farm wife.
1974	Or Else--Poem/Poems, 1968-1974. Warren's collection of new works examines the private and public life of the narrator, identified as "R.P.W." Included as well is verse dealing with writers: "Homage to Theodore Dreiser" and "Flaubert in Egypt."
1975	Or Else-Poem. Warren explores the private and public life of the persona identified as "R.P.W." He also publishes Democracy and Poetry, offering a survey of his career and poetics.
1977	A Place to Come To. In Warren's final novel a sixty-year-old classics scholar from Alabama reflects on his life and times.
1978	Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978. Warren wins his third Pulitzer Prize for this collection treating his Kentucky boyhood and later experiences.
1980	Being Here: Poetry, 1977-1980. This collection reflects Warren's strong grasp of narrative and his desire to involve the reader's reactions directly in his poems. The result is a remarkable immediacy in the treatment of topics such as the making of poetry in old age ("Fear and Trembling"), the nature of the world ("August Moon"), and the nature of time ("Speleology").
1981	Rumor Verified: Poems, 1979-1980. This collection, evidence of Warren's prolific last period, includes poems such as "Rumor at Twilight," "Vermont Ballad: Change of Season," and "Glimpses of Seasons," which demonstrate his continuing mastery of verse at once grounded in natural imagery, metaphysical speculation, and a sense of place and history.
1983	Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. Warren's penultimate poetry collection is a book-length narrative poem chronicling Chief Joseph's heroic resistance to relocation efforts before defeat by U.S. army troops. Warren's final collection, New and Selected Poems, would appear in 1985.
1986	Poet laureate of the United States. Robert Penn Warren is named the first official poet laureate of the United States.

Quotes:

"I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything."

"For what is a poem, but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding. It is the deepest part of autobiography."

"If, in the middle of World War II, a general could be writing a poem, then maybe I was not so irrelevant after all. Maybe the general was doing more for victory by writing a poem than he would be by commanding an army. At least, he might be doing less harm. By applying the same logic to my own condition [consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress], I decided that I might be relevant in what I called a negative way. I have clung to this concept ever sincenegative relevance. In moments of vain-glory I even entertain the possibility that if my concept were more widely accepted, the world might be a better place to live in. There are a lot of people who would make better citizens if they were content to be just negatively relevant."

"More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past."

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