Robert Penn Warren (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Robert Penn Warren’s was a remarkable life, no matter how one looks at it. He produced more than three dozen books in a career that spanned six decades. His ten novels included ALL THE KING’S MEN (1946), which not only won his first Pulitzer Prize in fiction, but is one of the finest political novels produced in America. He also published sixteen collections of poetry, two of which won Pulitzers, thus making Warren the only American writer to win the prize in two different categories. Finally, as a critic, he helped to shape the terms for the discussion of literary study in America after World War II.

Joseph Blotner’s biography is detailed and comprehensive, and maintains the necessary balance between the personal and the literary. He provides a valuable five-page chronology at the very beginning of the book, and fifty pages of notes and genealogy at the end, and this framework is extremely helpful in describing such a long and productive life.

Warren will probably be best remembered as a poet and critic. His poetic career almost spans the century, from the Modernist concerns of T. S. Eliot in the 1920’s, through the more confessional poetry after World War II. Warren was always a master craftsman, but his later poetry, while it retained his intellectual and moral concerns, also became more personal.

Warren’s textbooks revolutionized the study of literature in the United States, helping to make literary criticism more of an art and a science. In analyses that ranged widely over English and American literature, Warren broke through the limitations of the New Criticism he had helped create and modeled for readers an intelligent writer reading other writers. Not a system, he wrote, but “intelligence, tact, discipline, honesty, sensitivity—those are the things we have to depend on, after all, to give us what we prize in criticism, the insight.”

Sources for Further Study

America. CLXXVI, March 22, 1997, p. 33.

Booklist. XCIII, November, 1996, p. 474.

Kirkus Reviews. LXV, January 15, 1997, p. 112.

The New Leader. LXXX, April 21, 1997, p. 19.

The New Republic. CCXVII, October 20, 1997, p. 43.

The New York Times Book Review. CII, March 9, 1997, p. 11.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIII, November 11, 1996, p. 61.

The Times Literary Supplement. February 28, 1997, p. 5.

The Virginia Quarterly Review. LXXIII, Autumn, 1997, p. 729.

The Wall Street Journal. February 27, 1997, p. A15.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVII, February 23, 1997, p. 5.