Robert Penn Warren Biography

All the King's Men About the Author

Robert Penn Warren enjoyed a distinguished career as a novelist, poet, scholar, university professor, and man of letters. His first widely read work was the Pulitzer Prize-winning All the King's Men, and it was not until the 1950s that he actually seemed to be courting a wider audience. His best fiction maintains a high level of intellectual and dramatic interest, and yet remains accessible to ordinary readers.

Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, on April 24, 1905. After growing up in rural Kentucky, he began writing seriously as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s, where he intended to major in science.

But his interests changed at Vanderbilt when he came under the influence of John Crowe Ransom, already a poet and critic of some stature and a major figure in the awakening of southern culture labeled the "southern literary renaissance." Under Ransom's guidance Warren...
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