Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren was an acclaimed American poet, novelist, and literary critic, best known for being one of the founders of the New Criticism literary theory and as the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. Warren was born on April 24, 1905, in Guthrie, Kentucky, and went on to attend Clarksville High School in Tennessee, Vanderbilt University in 1925, and the University of California, Berkeley in 1926. He later obtained his B. Litt. as a Rhodes Scholar from New College, Oxford, in England in 1930.

Warren's career as a teacher began in 1930 at Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis, Tennessee. He subsequently taught at Vanderbilt University and Louisiana State University (LSU). While at LSU, Warren founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. Warren's writing strongly reflects Southern themes and mindset, and he published his most famous work, All the King's Men, while a professor at the University of Minnesota. He later lived in Fairfield, Connecticut, and Stratton, Vermont.

Warren's published works include poetry, novels, and literary criticism. His poetry collections include "Thirty-Six Poems" (1936), "Eleven Poems on the Same Theme" (1942), "Promises: Poems 1954-1956" (1957), and "Audubon: A Vision" (1969). His novels include "Night Rider" (1936), "All the King's Men" (1946), and "World Enough and Time" (1950). Warren's literary criticism works include "New Directions in Prose and Poetry" (1935), "Understanding Poetry" (1938), and "Selected Essays" (1958).

Warren won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for "All the King's Men" in 1947, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 for "Promises: Poems 1954-1956" and in 1979 for "Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978". He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Italy during the rule of Benito Mussolini. Warren passed away on September 15, 1989, due to complications from bone cancer.