Robert Penn Warren, often called a great American writer and poet, was born on
April 24, 1905, in
Guthrie,
Kentucky. His mother was a school teacher and his father a banker who loved poetry but has been described as
aloof, a character in many of Warren's writing. In 1921 he entered
Vanderbilt University to study electrical engineering, and was the youngest member to join a small group of
Southern poets who called themselves
The Fugitives. At one point, he attempted to commit suicide after falling behind on his studies. He graduated in 1925 and proceeded to study at the
University of California,
Berkeley, where he received his Master's Degree, then studied at
Yale and then
Oxford as a
Rhodes Scholar. He became a professor of literature and began teaching at Louisiana State University in 1934, then later at the
University of Minnesota from 1942 and Yale in 1973.
His first novel,
Night Rider, was published in 1939, a story about the tobacco war during the time he was born. His later novel,
All The King's Men (1946), received much critical acclaim and has since been made into both a play and a movie, as well as translated into twenty different languages.
In 1930 he married
Emma Brescia, a woman suffering from
neurasthenia and bedridden, which ended in divorce in 1950. In 1952 he married the novelist
Eleanor Clark and they had two children, a boy and a girl. On September 15, 1989, he died of cancer in
Stratton,
Vermont.
Although Warren is more widely known for his novels, he wrote great amounts of poetry and received two
Pulitzer Prizes for two seperate books of poetry,
Promises and
Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978. He is the only person to have received a Pulitzer in both poetry and fiction, and has received three Pulitzers in all. He was also the first
poet laureate and has attained virtually every major award given to U.S. writers, including the
National Medal for Literature in 1970, the
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980, and the Prize Fellowship of the John D. Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation in 1981.
Some of his works include:
Poetry (partial list):
Fiction: