Robert Penn Warren
| Robert Penn Warren | |
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| Born | 24 April 1905 Guthrie, Kentucky, USA |
| Died | 15 September 1989 (aged 84) Stratton, Vermont, USA |
| Occupation | Poet, novelist |
| Nationality | United States |
| Alma mater | Vanderbilt University University of California at Berkeley Oxford University Yale University |
Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for his novel All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.[1]
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early years
Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, which is very near the Tennessee-Kentucky border, to Robert Warren and Anna Penn.[2] Warren's mother's family had roots in Virginia, having given their name to the community of Penn's Store in Patrick County, Virginia.[3] Robert Penn Warren graduated from Clarksville High School in Clarksville, Tennessee, Vanderbilt University in 1925 and the University of California, Berkeley in 1926. Warren later attended Yale University and obtained his B. Litt. as a Rhodes Scholar from New College, Oxford, in England in 1930. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Italy during the rule of Benito Mussolini. That same year he began his teaching career at Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis, Tennessee.
[edit] Career
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). In "The Briar Patch" the young Warren defends racial segregation, in line with the traditionalist conservative political leanings of the Agrarian group, although Davidson deemed Warren's stances in the essay so progressive that he argued for excluding it from the collection.[4] However, Warren recanted these views in an article on the Civil Rights Movement, "Divided South Searches Its Soul", which appeared in the July 9, 1956 issue of Life magazine. A month later, Warren published an expanded version of the article as a small book titled Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South.[5] He subsequently adopted a high profile as a supporter of racial integration. In 1965, he published Who Speaks for the Negro?, a collection of interviews with black civil rights leaders including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, thus further distinguishing his political leanings from the more conservative philosophies associated with fellow Agrarians such as Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and particularly Davidson. Warren's interviews with civil rights leaders are at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky.[6]
Warren's best-known work is All the King's Men, a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. Main character Willie Stark resembles Huey Pierce Long (1893–1935), the radical populist governor of Louisiana whom Warren was able to observe closely while teaching at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge from 1933 to 1942. All the King's Men became a highly successful film, starring Broderick Crawford and winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1949. A 2006 film adaptation by writer/director Steven Zaillian featured Sean Penn as Willie Stark and Jude Law as Jack Burden. The opera Willie Stark by Carlisle Floyd to his own libretto based on the novel was premiered in 1981.
Warren served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 1944–1945 (later termed Poet Laureate), and won two Pulitzer Prizes in poetry, in 1958 for Promises: Poems 1954-1956 and in 1979 for Now and Then. Promises also won the annual National Book Award for Poetry.[7]
In 1974, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Warren's lecture was entitled "Poetry and Democracy" (subsequently published under the title Democracy and Poetry).[8][9] In 1980, Warren was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter. 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. In 1987, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.[10]
Warren was co-author, with Cleanth Brooks, of Understanding Poetry, an influential literature textbook. It was followed by other similarly co-authored textbooks, including Understanding Fiction, which was praised by Southern Gothic and Roman Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor, and Modern Rhetoric, which adopted what can be called a New Critical perspective.
[edit] Personal life
Warren was secretly married in the summer of 1929 to Emma Brescia until their divorce in 1951. His second marriage was in 1952 to Eleanor Clark, with whom he had two children, Rosanna Phelps Warren (b. 1953) and Gabriel Penn Warren (b. 1955). He lived the latter part of his life in Fairfield, Connecticut, and Stratton, Vermont where he died of complications from bone cancer. He is buried at Stratton, Vermont, and, at his request, a memorial marker is situated in the Warren family gravesite in Guthrie, Kentucky.
[edit] Legacy
In April 2005, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp to mark the 100th anniversary of 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.
Vanderbilt University houses the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities,[11] which is sponsored by the College of Arts and Science. It began its programs in January 1988, and in 1989 received a $480,000 Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The center promotes "interdisciplinary research and study in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences."
[edit] Works
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[edit] References
- ^ Nelson, Randy F. The Almanac of American Letters. Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1981: 27. ISBN 0-86576-008-X
- ^ Ehrlich, Eugene and Gorton Carruth. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982: 291. ISBN 0-19-503186-5
- ^ Patrick County People, Free State of Patrick
- ^ Wood, Edwin Thomas. "On Native Soil: A Visit with Robert Penn Warren," Mississippi Quarterly 38 (Winter 1984)
- ^ Metress, Christopher. "Fighting battles one by one: Robert Penn Warren's Segregation", The Southern Review, Winter 1996.
- ^ Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History
- ^ "National Book Awards – 1958". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-02.
(With essay by Kiki Petrosino from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) - ^ Jefferson Lecturers at NEH Website (retrieved January 22, 2009).
- ^ Catalog listing for Democracy and Poetry at Harvard University Press website (retrieved February 12, 2009).
- ^ Lifetime Honors - National Medal of Arts
- ^ Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities
- Encyclopedia of Kentucky. New York, New York: Somerset Publishers. 1987. pp. 188–189. ISBN 0403099811.
- List of Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients -- Literature
- robertpennwarren.com
[edit] Further reading
- Millichap, Joseph R.. Robert Penn Warren after Audubon:The Work of Aging and the Quest for Transcendence in His Later Poetry. Baton Rouge, LA. :Louisiana State University Press, 2009 ISBN 978-0-8071-3456-6
[edit] External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Robert Penn Warren |
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Robert Penn Warren |
- Robert Penn Warren Oral History Project
- Robert Penn Warren bio at The Fellowship of Southern Writers
- Robert Penn Warren page at poets.org
- Robert Penn Warren page at KYLIT/Kentucky Literature
- Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University
- Robert Penn Warren site run by tloufrey@charter.net
- Eugene Walter and Ralph Ellison (Spring-Summer 1957). "Robert Penn Warren, The Art of Fiction No. 18". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4868/the-art-of-fiction-no-18-robert-penn-warren.
- Yale biography
- Timeline of Poets Laureate at the Library of Congress
- Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
- Guide to the Robert Penn Warren Photograph Collection at the University of Kentucky.
- Guide to the Robert Penn Warren papers, 1916-1967 at the University of Kentucky.
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- 1905 births
- 1989 deaths
- American literary critics
- American novelists
- American poets
- American Poets Laureate
- American Rhodes scholars
- Deaths from bone cancer
- Formalist poets
- Guggenheim Fellows
- Louisiana State University faculty
- MacArthur Fellows
- National Book Award winners
- New Criticism
- Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winners
- Pulitzer Prize for the Novel winners
- United States National Medal of Arts recipients
- University of California, Berkeley alumni
- University of Iowa faculty
- Vanderbilt University alumni
- Writers from Kentucky
- Writers from Louisiana
