Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky in 1906, the son of a banker and a schoolteacher. He studied at Vanderbilt University, where he fell in with the Fugitives — a group of poets and critics including John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate who were reacting against the industrialization of the South and advocating a return to agrarian values. The association shaped his critical outlook and his politics, both of which he later revised. He took a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and taught at Vanderbilt, Louisiana State, and eventually Yale, where he spent the bulk of his career.

At Louisiana State in 1935, he co-founded The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks, which became one of the most important literary journals in America. With Brooks he also wrote Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943), the anthologies and textbooks that defined New Criticism for a generation of American students — the close reading of texts as autonomous objects, independent of biographical or historical context. The influence on university English departments was enormous and lasted for decades.

All the King's Men (1946) was the novel that made his reputation permanent. It is based on Huey Long, the Louisiana governor and senator who was assassinated in 1935 and who remains one of the most compelling figures in American political history — a genuine champion of the poor who was also a demagogue and a political criminal. Warren's protagonist is not Long himself but Willie Stark, a similar figure, and the novel's true center is its narrator, Jack Burden — a disillusioned former idealist who serves Stark's machine and whose moral compromise is as damning as Stark's. The novel is about what happens when idealism encounters the actual exercise of power: how quickly the idealist becomes the enabler, and what that reveals about the idealist's original purity. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1947.

He is the only writer to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry — fiction in 1947 for All the King's Men, poetry in 1958 for Promises: Poems 1954–1956, and poetry again in 1979 for Now and Then: Poems 1976–1978. His poetry is formally ambitious and deeply concerned with history, guilt, and the American South. Audubon: A Vision (1969), a long poem sequence about the naturalist John James Audubon, is considered his finest poetic achievement. He was named the first official Poet Laureate of the United States in 1986.

His racial politics in earlier decades constitute a genuine complication. In 1929 he contributed an essay to I'll Take My Stand, the Fugitive/Agrarian manifesto, defending racial segregation as appropriate to Southern conditions. He repudiated that essay publicly and completely later in life, and wrote Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), a serious engagement with the civil rights movement based on extensive interviews with Black leaders including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. The repudiation was unambiguous, but the original essay does not disappear from the record. How to weigh a serious intellectual's serious moral error against a career of subsequent work is a question his legacy forces readers to confront directly, without an easy answer.