Robert Penn Warren: A Biography

Robert Penn Warren published ten novels, sixteen volumes of poetry, a book of short stories, two selections of critical essays, a biography, three historical essays, a critical book on Dreiser, a study of Melville, and two studies of race relations in America. In addition, he had an active career as an editor and as a professor of English in America's foremost universities. With All the King's Men, he was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize. Two more Pulitzers followed (for poetry), and he won, as well, virtually all the other major awards for American writers. For almost six decades he was a dominant, influential, and much-loved author. This remarkable career is fully examined for the first time in Joseph Blotner's authoritative biography, in which Red Warren's life turns out to be far more interesting than most of us knew. It is a life that reflects the main currents of twentieth-century American literary activity, a life enhanced by important friendships with Allen Tate, Katherine Anne Porter, Andrew Lytle, Eudora Welty, T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, Albert Erskine - one of the great American editors - and many others.