In a sixty-year career he published more than twenty-five volumes of verse and fiction, a dozen books of nonfiction prose, and manyessays and textbooks. This prolific creativity arguably made Warren his nation's foremost living man of letters--"America's Dean of Letters," according to a 25 August 1980
Newsweek essay.
Far from imagining such a future, Warren, the son of Robert Franklin and Ruth Penn Warren, grew up in the small town of Guthrie, Kentucky, wanting to be a sea captain. After dividing his boyhood years between his grandfather's farm in summer and his family home during school terms, he obtained an appointment to enroll as a naval cadet at Annapolis. While he was waiting for the appointment to become active, however, a serious eye injury changed his plans, and he instead matriculated at Vanderbilt University in 1921 with the intention of becoming an electrical engineer.
During his freshman year, an English course with John Crowe Ransom along with the influence of Allen Tate, an older student whom he met early in 1923, combined to kindle Warren's passion for literature, leading him to become part of the Fugitive group in Nashville, so named after their literary magazine of the mid-1920s.
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