American novelist, poet, critic, teacher, who became the first poet laureate of the United States in 1986. Robert Penn Warren received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry twice, in 1957 for Promises, and 1979 for Now and Then. His poetic style was, at the beginning, tightly controlled in form, but later he wrote often in free verse. Warren's best-known novel is All the King's Men (1946), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. The narrator, from the very first page, speaks directly to the reader: 

"To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out o£ the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don’t quit staring at that line and don’t take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you’ll hypnotize yourself and you’ll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you’ll try to jerk her back on but you can’t because the slab is high like a curb, and maybe you’ll try to reach to turn off the ignition just as she starts the dive. But you won’t make it, of course." (All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946, p. 3)

Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky. His childhood house was full of books. Anna Ruth Penn Warren, his mother, was a school teacher, and father, Robert Franklin Warren, a banker, a poetry-loving but aloof figure, whose character appeared in several of Warren's poems. Before dinner, or after, he used to read poems or history to his children. A free thinker, he also encouraged Warren to read Darwin at the age of fourteen. Robert Franklin Warren paid him to read the Bible, at the rate of three chapters a day. (Robert Penn Warren: A Biography by Joseph Blotner, New York: Random House, 1997, p. 19)

During his boyhood and adolescence, Warren spent summers around Cerulean Springs on the farm of his grandfather, a Confederate veteran, "the living symbol of the wild action and romance of the past." ('A Self-Interview' by Robert Penn Warren, Talking with Robert Penn Warren, edited by Floyd C. Watkins, John T. Hiers, and Mary Louise Weaks, Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1990, p. 2) In his teens Warren's ambition was to become an officer in the Unites States Navy.

Once he found his father's name and picture from an old book entitled Poets of America. "I showed him the book. He took it – what must have been an old vanity publication of some kind – and turned away. I never saw it again. But years later the episode became haunting for me, even in poems, including one long poem about the man, then long dead. By then I had found his old Greek lexicon and his grammar, dating back to his youth when he, having his first job, had hired a professor at the university in Clarksville, Tenn., to tutor him. That, too, got into poetry." (''Poetry is a kind of unconscious autobiography'' by Robert Penn Warren, The New York Times, May 12, 1985)

At the age of 17 Warren lost his change for naval career at Annapolis, when his younger brother, William Thomas, throw over a hedge a piece coal. It hit him in the left eye, which he lost to surgery. "There is irony in this," said the novelist William Styron, who became his friend, "for it always has seemed to me that Red at least looks like a sailor . . . that seamed and craggy face which has gazed, like Melville's into the briny abyss, that weather-wise expression and salty presence which have made him physically the very model of a sea dog . . ." (This Quiet Dust: And Other Writings by William Styron, New York: Random House, 1983, p. 245)

In 1921 Warren entered Vanderbilt University to study electrical engineering, but soon joined the literary group Fugitives (later the Agrarians), named after the poetry magazine they published in the mid-1920s. Among its members were John Crowe Ransom, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate. In 1930 Warren contributed their manifesto I'll Take My Stand, a plea for the agrarian way of life in the South. Warren attacked on northern industrialism of America – he saw that black workers from the land were exploited in factories.

On May 19, 1924 Warren attempted suicide. He had fallen far behind his studies and he had an unsuccessful love affair with Chinc Nichol, a cousin of the author and educator Andrew Nelson Lytle. Later in life Warren claimed that the attempt resulted from his fear of blindness. Following graduation in 1925, Warren pursued studies at Berkeley, Yale, and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, earning his B.Litt in 1930.

Before graduating from Oxford, Warren's met Emma "Cinina" Brescia, whom he married in a secret seremony in 1929. Her father, Domenico, was a composer, and orchestral director, who headed the music department at Mills College. From 1930 Warren held a succession of academic positions. He began his teaching career at Southwestern College in Memphis, Tennessee, then moved to Vanderbilt University for three years, and in 1934 to Louisiana State University.Warren's first book, John Brown, about the abolitionist's life and politics, came out five days after the stock market crash in 1929. He was 24. 

During this period Warren met such writers as Hart Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Katherine Anne Porter was his fellow protester during the famous Sacco-Vanzetti trial. Night Rider (1939), Warren's first novel, told about tobacco war (1905-1908) between the independent growers in Kentucky and large tobacco companies. The story blends historical events with action and deeper philosophical concerns. Warren wrote Night Rider while writing An Approach to Literature (1938) with Cleanth Brooks and John Thibaut Purser. 

As a professor of literature, Warren edited the literary quarterly The Southern Review, one of the most noteworthy magazines of its time, which he had founded with Cleanth Brook and Charles W. Pipkin. It published stories and poems by Eudora Welty, Mary McCarthy, Ford Madox Ford, and W.H. Auden, among others. The magazine was disbanded in 1942.

Warren was professor at the University of Minnesota (1942-1950), and from 1950 at Yale, where his friend Cleanth Brooks was employed too, becoming professor emeritus in 1973. Warren turned down offer from University of California in 1951 by refusing to sign the faculty loyalty oath required for the job. ("I am not a member of the Communist Party or under any commitment that is in conflict with my obligations under this oath.") The controversial rule was declared unconstitutionalby the California Supreme Court in 1952.

Although Warren did not live the last decades of his life in the South, its history and culture remained central in his works. "The place I wanted to live, the place I thought was heaven to me, after my years of wandering," he later said in an interview, "was middle Tennessee, which is a beautiful country, or was a beautiful country – it's rapidly being ruined." ('The South: Distance and Change' by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Talking with Robert Penn Warren, p. 272)

Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965) was based on his interview about the civil rights movement. He had defended segregation in his early essay, 'The Briar Patch,' but later Warren said that he had been wrong. Citing Erik Erikson's essay 'Identity and the Life Cycle' (1959), Warren argued that slavery had robbed African black both their individual and cultural identity. "As a kind of parallel for the shock of the capture and voyage we may take the description by Erik Erikson of the condition of certain discharged American veterans of World War II suffering from "loss of ego synthesis;  in too many respect at once; somatic tension, social panic, and ego anxiety are always present." (Who Speaks for the Negro?, with an introduction by David W. Blight, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014, p. 54) Other works of non-fictional prose include Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956) and Remember the Alamo! (1958).

All the King's Men is narrated by a reporter, Jack Burden, who is loyal to his boss, Willie Stark, a political demagogue. Warren denied that the character of Stark was based on the Louisiana politician Huey "the Kingfish" Long, whose career he had observed from a distance at Louisiana State University. At first Warren wrote the work as a verse play, called Proud Flesh. His examination of Machiavellian politics and idealism corrupted by power was a critical and popular success, and was translated into some twenty languages.

The novel shocked many Americans who believed in the integrity of their political leaders. All the King's Men gained fame also as a play and film. Columbia Pictures reportedly paid $200,000 for the rights of the novel. The veteran actor Broderick Crawford broke out of B films in his portrayal of Willie Stark. John Wayne had turned down the role, saying that Warren's original novel (as well as the screenplay) disgusted him. (Retakes: Behind the Scenes of 500 Classic Movies by John Eastman, New York: Ballantine Books, 1989, pp. 12-13)

Warren's other novels include At Heaven's Gate (1943), World Enough and Time (1950), a historical novel about a murder trial in Kentucky in the 1820s, Flood: A Romance of Our Times (1964), the story of a Tennessee Valley Authority dam project, and A Place to Come to (1977).

Though Warren published ten novels, he regarded himself as a poet first and a novelist and critic second. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), "the apotheosis of modernity", as John Crowe Ransom characterized it, influenced Warren deeply. He recalled in a conversation in 1970 in his office at Silliman College, Yale University, with Ruth Fisher, that "it was certainly a watershed in my life and the lives of many of my friends.. . . I was completely overwhelmed by it and didn't, I promise you, understand it all. There was no model for it." ('A Conversation with Robert Penn Warren' by Ruth Fisher, Talking with Robert Penn Warren, p. 180) Warren's early career as a poet attracted little public attention, and for many years his fame as a writer rested chiefly upon his philosophical novels. He wrote literary criticism about such writers as Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Coleridge and Melville. His first book of verse, Thirty-Six Poems (1935) showed the influence of Ransom, Thomas Hardy, and the 17th-century metaphysical poets, whom he specialized in teaching. In 1939 he argued that American poetry had very little to offer the modern writer. Whitman's influence, on the technical side, he considered "destructive."

Warren's experimental tendency, partly inspired by T.S. Eliot's works, marked the collection Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1942), and culminated in one of his very finest poems, 'The Ballad of Billie Potts,' in Selected Poems, 1923-1943 (1944). He heard the story from in his childhood and years later came across another version in book of the history of the outlaws of rhe Cave Inn Rock, or the Cave-In-Rock. "Big Billie Potts was big and stout / In the land between the rivers. / His shoulders were wide and his gut stuck out / Like a croker of nubbins and his holler and shout / Made the bob-cat shiver and the black-jack leaves shake / In the section between the rivers. / He would slap you on your back and laugh." (The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, edited by John Burt, with a foreword by Harold Bloom, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998, p. 81)

The volumes of poetry after Brother to Dragons (1953), which centered upon a killing of a slave committed by Thomas Jefferson's nephew, feature a number of forms and styles, and range through various subject matter. Warren has told that there has been periods when he just stared the empty space on a sheet of paper which the right word would not come to fill.  Incarnations: Poems, 1966-1968 (1968) signaled Warren's break with Eliot.

Between 1956 and 1962 Warren took a break from teaching at Yale. To a Little Girl, One Year Old, in a Ruined Fortress (1957) came out after his divorce and a new marriage. It was inspired by Mediterranean scenes, and started a new period in the authors creative life. Rumor Verified  (1981) received mixed critics and was condemned by Donald Hall for abstraction, melodrama, and carelessness. "In one short poem we have love, heart, pastness, hope, despair, doom, future, history, ignorance and experience. The capitalized abstraction Time turns up 14 times, along with Reality, Hope, Eternity, History, Space and Truth. Cliché and abstraction compete with banality: 'Have you ever seen your own child, that first morning, wait/ For the school bus?'" ('Easy Lines,' The New York Times, November 8, 1981)

A leading representative of the New Criticism, Warren collaborated with Cleanth Brooks to write Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943). These works helped revolutionize the teaching of literature by bringing New Criticism – the theory got its name from John Crowe Ransom's book The New Criticism (1941) – into the general practice in America's college classrooms. This approach emphasized the detailed textual analysis of poetry instead of examining the mind and personality of the author.

In the late 1940s Warren drank heavily. He published no poetry. Emma was institutionalized several times; her neurasthenic personality forced her to spend much of her time bedridden. The marriage was childless and ended in divorce in 1951. After being awaeded a Guggenheim Fellowship Went went to Italy to work on the novel World Enough and Time. In 1952 he married the novelist Eleanor Clark; they had a son and a daughter. This relationship brought stability to his life. With her Warren setted into an old farmhouse and barn that they restored themselves in Fairfield, Connecticut.

From the 1950s Warren lived in Connecticut and in rural Vermont, a recurring site for his poetry, such as 'Vermont Ballad: Change of Season' (1980). His last years Warren suffered from cancer, and he felt he had no energy. Robert Penn Warren died on September 15, 1989, in Stratton, Vermont. He was buried near his summer house in West Wardsboro, Vermont. Warren received many honors, including National Medal for Literature in 1970, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980, and the Prize Fellowship of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1981. He was named Poet Laureate in 1986 and held the post for two years.

For further reading: The Fugitives: A Critical Account by John M. Bradbury (1958); Robert Penn Warren: The Dark and Bloody Ground by Leonard Caspar (1960); Robert Penn Warren by Charles H. Bohner (1964); Robert Penn Warren by Paul West (1964); Robert Penn Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by John L. Longley (1965); Colder Fire: The Poetry of Warren by Victor H. Strandberg (1965); Web of Being: The Novels of Robert Penn Warren by Barnett Guttenberg (1975); The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren by Victor H. Strandberg (1977); In the Heart's Last Kingdom: Robert Penn Warren's Major Poetry by Calvin Bedient (1984); The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren by William Bedford Clark (1991); Robert Penn Warren: A Study of the Short Fiction by Joseph R. Millichap (1992); Robert Penn Warren's Modernist Spirituality by Robert S. Koppelman (1995); Robert Penn Warren: A Biography by Joseph  Blotner (1997); The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren, ed. by David Madden (2000); Robert Penn Warren, ed. by Harold Bloom (2000); Poems of Pure Imagination: Robert Penn Warren and the Romantic Tradition by Lesa Carnes Corrigan (2001); Understanding Robert Penn Warren by James A. Grimshaw Jr. (2001); Conversations With Robert Penn Warren, ed. by Gloria L. Cronin, Ben Siegel (2005); Robert Penn Warren After Audubon: The Work of Aging and the Quest for Transcendence in His Later Poetry by Joseph R. Millichap (2009); Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: a Reader's Companion by Jonathan S. Cullick (2018); Warren, Jarrell, Lowell: Collaboration in the Reshaping of American Poetry by Joan Romano Shifflet (2020); Robert Penn Warren, Shadowy Autobiography, and Other Makers of American Literature by Joseph R. Millichap (2021); The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-century American Novel and Politics, edited by Bryan Santin (2023); Heroes with a Hundred Names: Mythology and Folklore in the Early Fiction of Robert Penn Warren by Leverett Butts (2023)

Selected works:

• John Brown: The Making of a Martyr, 1929
• Pondy Woods, 1930
• I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, 1930
• Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students, 1938 (with Cleanth Brooks)
• Thirty-Six Poems, 1935
• An Approach to Literature, 1938 (with Cleanth Brooks and John Thibaut Purser, rev. ed., 1939)
• Night Rider, 1939
• Eleven Poems on the Same Theme, 1942
• At Heaven's Gate, 1943
• Understanding Fiction, 1943 (with Cleanth Brooks)
• Selected Poems, 1923-1943, 1944
• All the King's Men, 1946 (Pulitzer Prize)
  - Kaikki kuninkaan miehet (suom. Juhani Koskinen, 1976)
  - films: 1949, dir. by Robert Rossen, starring Broderick Crawford, John Ireland, Mercedes McCambridge, Joanne Dru. "Brilliant adaptation (by director Rossen) of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer-winning novel about the rise and fall of a Huey Long-like senator, played by Crawford in the performance of his career. He and McCambridge (in her first film) won well-deserved Oscars, as did the film, for Best Picture." (Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide, edited by Leonard Maltin, New York, NY: Plume, 2005, p. 12) TV film 1958, dir. by Sidney Lumet, starring Neville Brand, Maureen Stapleton; 2006, dir. by Steven Zaillian, starring Sean Penn, Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins, Kate Winslet
• Blackberry Winter, 1946 (illustrated by Wightman Williams)
• The Circus in the Attic, and Other Stories, 1948
• Modern Rhetoric, 1949 (with Cleanth Brooks)
• World Enough and Time: A Romantic Novel, 1950
• Fundamentals of Good Writing: A Handbook of Modern Rhetoric, 1950 (with Cleanth Brooks)
• An Anthology of Stories from the Southern Review, 1953 (edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren)
• Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices, 1953
• Short Story Masterpieces, 1954 (edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine)
• Band of Angels, 1955
  - film 1955, prod. Warner Bros. Pictures, dir. Raoul Walsh, starring Clark Gable, Yvonne De Carlo, Sidney Poitier, Efrem Zimbalist Jr.
• Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, 1956
• To a Little Girl, One Year Old, in a Ruined Fortress, 1957
• Promises: Poems 1954-1956, 1957 (Pulitzer Prize)
• A New Southern Harvest: An Anthology, 1957 (edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine)
• Selected Essays, 1958
• Remember the Alamo!, 1958
• The Gods of Mount Olympus, 1959 (illustrated by William Moyers)
• The Cave, 1959
• How Texas Won Her Freedom: The Story of Sam Houston & The Battle of San Jacinto, 1959
• Proud Flesh, 196-? (verse drama)
• All the King's Men, 1960 (play, from the novel, 1947) 
• You, Emperors, and Others: Poems, 1957-1960, 1960
• The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial, 1961
• Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War, 1961
• Flood: A Romance of Our Time, 1964
• Who Speaks for the Negro?, 1965
• Selected Poems: New and Old 1923-1966, 1966
• A Plea in Mitigation: Modern Poetry and the End of an Era, 1966
• Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1966 (edited by Robert Penn Warren)
• Incarnations: Poems, 1966-1968, 1968
• Audubon: A Vision, 1969
• Meet Me in the Green Glen, 1971
• Homage to Theodor Dreiser, August 27, 1871-December 28, 1945, on the Centennial of His Birth, 1971
• John Greenleaf Whittier's Poetry: An Appraisal and a Selection, 1971
• A Conversation with Robert Penn Warren, 1972 (edited by Frank Gado)
• American Literature: The Makers and the Making, 1973 (editor, with Cleanth Brooks and R.W.B. Lewis)
• Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968 – 1974, 1975
• Democracy and Poetry, 1975
• Selected Poems, 1923-1975, 1976 (illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon)
• A Place to Come to, 1977
  - Jokin tässä elämässä (suom. Juhani Koskinen, 1979)
• Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978, 1978 (Pulitzer Prize)
• Two Poems, 1979
• Being Here: Poetry, 1977-1980 , 1980
• Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back, 1980
• Robert Penn Warren Talking: Interviews, 1950-1978, 1980 ( edited by Floyd C. Watkins and John T. Hiers)
• Rumor Verified: Poems 1979-1980, 1981
• Love: Four Versions, 1981
• Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, Who Called Themselves the Nimipu, "The Real People": A Poem , 1983
• New and Selected Poems 1923-1985, 1985 (illustrated by Christopher Wormell)
• Portrait of a Father, 1988
• Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence, 1998 (edited by James A. Grimshaw Jr.)
• The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, 1998 (edited by John Burt)
• Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren: The Apprentice Years 1924-1934, 2000 (ed. by Willian Bedford Clark)
• Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren: The "Southern Review" Years, 1935-1942, 2001 (edited by William Bedford Clark)
• Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren: Triumph And Transition, 1943-1952, 2006  (edited by Randy Hendricks and James A. Perkins)
• Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren: New Beginnings and New Directions, 1953-1968, 2008 (edited by Randy Hendricks and James A. Perkins)
• Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren: Backward Glances and New Visions, 1969-1979, 2011 (edited by Randy Hendricks and James A. Perkins)
• The Ballad of Billie Potts: with Illustrations by P. John Burden, 2017 (1st edition; Minneapolis, MN: Bunim & Bannigan Ltd)