Almanac of Story Tellers: Robert Penn Warren

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of April 24th

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    It is the 114th day of the year, leaving 251 days remaining in 2022.

   

    On this date in 1905, the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Ky.

    He was a writer, a critic, and a literary scholar who taught at Yale University. He was a Rhodes Scholar, founded and edited The Southern Review, one of the foremost literary magazines of its time, and won three Pulitzer Prizes.

    His long narrative poem, Brother to Dragons, published in 1953, tells the story of the brutal murder of a slave by two cousins of Thomas Jefferson. His first novel, Night Rider, tells the story of the tobacco wars in Kentucky at the beginning of the 20th Century. 

    While most admired in his lifetime as a poet -- he was named the first U.S. Poet Laureatte in 1986 -- he is perhaps best known as the author of All The King's Men, a tragic literary-political novel that focuses on an idealistic turned cynical young man whose lust for power corrupts him and those around him. 

    Loosely based on the life of Louisiana Gov. Huey P. Long, the novel hammers home its theme that one's actions have consequences, and one must take responsibility for what one does. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

    Warren's own politics charged over time, as did his poetic style. As a young man, he contributed to the southern agrarian manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, writing in favor of racial segregation. But in later years, he supported racial intergration, and in 1965 published Who Speaks for the Negro, a series of interviews with Black Civil Rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X.

    Poets.org, a website that publishes biographies of poets, writes that as Warren's political views progressed, so did his poetry. It became less formal and more expansive, but continued to address the same issues as his novels. Promise: Poems, 1954-1956, won Warren his first Pulitzer for Poetry. Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978, gave him his second Pulitizer for Poetry and his third overall.

    He is the only person to win a Pulitzer for both fiction and poetry.

    Warren died in 1989 in Stratton, Vt.