[This entry was updated by Victor Strandberg (Duke University) from his update in the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, volume 6, of the entries by him in DLB 48: American Poets, 1880-1945, Second Series, and by Everett Wilkie (University of South Carolina) and Josephine Helterman in DLB 2: American Novelists Since World War II.]
Robert Penn Warren's reputation as one of the most versatile and talented American men of letters has grown steadily since the publication of his first work in 1929. Although he achieved instant recognition among scholars as a critic, poet, and essayist, popular acceptance of his work was not forthcoming until the 1946 publication of All the King's Men. As Leonard Casper and Charles Bohner have noted, this situation was the probable result of financial disasters at home and wartime conditions abroad. Warren's first book, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929), reached bookstores during the stock-market crash; Night Rider (1939) was published as Hitler entered Prague; and At Heaven's Gate (1943) was largely ignored at the height of American military involvement in Europe during World War II.
