Robert Penn Warren (Dictionary of World Biography: The 20th Century)

Early Life

Robert Penn Warren was the oldest of three children born to Robert Franklin Warren and Anna Ruth Warren. As a young man, Robert Franklin had written poetry, but he had been forced to abandon his literary ambitions in order to work as a banker and shopkeeper to support his family. Still, the Warren household was filled with books, particularly books of poetry.

Guthrie, Kentucky, Warren’s birthplace and childhood home, was a rough railroad town where acts of violence and bloodshed were common, as they would later be in Warren’s fiction and poetry. The...

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