Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Extract

Robert Penn Warren's voice and reputation dominated twentieth-century writing across diverse forms and genres, including poetry, fiction, biography, pedagogy, drama, memoir, literary criticism, and social commentary. Although the bulk of Warren's literary legacy is almost six decades of poetic output, especially the poetry of his later life, the yeomanry of his fiction also reveals a Southerner struggling with dichotomous aspects of his twentieth-century milieu: high and low culture, mythic past and uncertain present, place-boundedness and expatriate yearnings homeward. Born in 1905 in Guthrie, Kentucky to parents who set high standards of achievement and self-sacrifice, Warren enrolled at Nashville's Vanderbilt University and majored in literature when he was included in the heady camaraderie of the Fugitive Group, which included John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. Both promoted Warren's early poetry, critiqued his later fiction, and remained his good friends until their deaths. Warren's relationship with the Fugitives and the Agrarians helped establish him as a poet and academic, yet he also needed to write fiction to establish himself financially. His first novel, Night Rider ( 1939 ), exemplified the circumstances that would drive Warren's writing. Set in the South in his own Kentucky, it drew upon memories of the Tobacco Wars shared with him by his Grandfather Penn while expanding ... log in or subscribe to read full text