Robert Penn Warren

Biography

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) was born in Guthrie, Kentucky and grew up in the rural South that shapes every page of this novel. He was a founding member of the New Critics, a literary movement that insisted on close reading of the text itself — ironic, given that his most famous novel demands historical and biographical context to be fully understood. He was the only person to win the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction (All the King's Men, 1947) and poetry (Promises, 1958, and Now and Then, 1979). He was named the first Poet Laureate of the United States in 1986. He studied at Vanderbilt, UC Berkeley, Yale, and Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar), and taught at LSU during the Huey Long era, which gave him the raw material for Willie Stark.

Robert Penn Warren at a glance