Robert Penn Warren

University pays tribute to Penn Warren to mark centenary of Pulitzer Prize-winner's birth

Yale will mark the centenary of the birth of three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former Yale faculty member Robert Penn Warren on Tuesday, Nov. 1.

Warren (1905-1989) is best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning "All the King's Men," the most famous of his 10 novels. He also received Pulitzers for his poetry books "Now and Then" and "Promises: Poems 1954-1956," and was the United States' first poet laureate. In addition, he was a major literary critic, an early proponent of the New Criticism, an approach demanding a close analysis of text which dominated the study of literature in American universities from the 1940s through the 1960s.

"A Tribute to Robert Penn Warren" will take place at 5 p.m. in Rm. 101 of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 61 High St. It is free and open to the public.

Speaking at the program will be Warren's daughter Rosanna Warren, herself an acclaimed poet; Yale literary critics Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, and John Hollander, Sterling Professor of English and a noted poet; David Rosen, a friend of the Warren family; Professor John Burt of Brandeis University, who is Warren's literary executor; Nancy Lewis, widow of R.W.B. Lewis and a Warren family friend; and the critically acclaimed Hollywood writer and producer David Milch, who became a protégé of Warren as a student at Yale. The program will also feature recordings of Warren reading his own poetry.

Warren was born in Kentucky and attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. At Vanderbilt, he became closely associated with the poet Allen Tate, at one time his roommate, and the poet John Crowe Ransom, who was his teacher. Ransom and Tate were part of a larger coterie of writers and poets known as the Fugitives, who lived in Nashville in the 1920s and founded the literary journal that gave them their name. The Fugitive was the first magazine to publish Warren's poetry, and it became synonymous with a literary movement, of which Warren was part, that was steeped in the culture and idiom of the old South.

After graduating from Vanderbilt and doing graduate work at the University of California and at Yale, Warren went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Returning from England in 1938, he took up his first teaching post at Southwestern College in Memphis, Tennessee. A year later he returned to Vanderbilt, where he taught for three years. It was during his next academic tenure, at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, that Warren established his reputation as a teacher and literary critic. There he was instrumental in founding the influential literary journal The Southern Review. With Cleanth Brooks, a colleague at Louisiana State (and later at Yale), Warren authored the textbook "Understanding Poetry" and a companion volume "Understanding Fiction," which changed how literature was taught in America for the next quarter of a century. While at Louisiana State, Warren wrote "Night Rider," his first published novel.

In 1942, Warren left Louisiana State for the University of Minnesota, where he taught creative writing. He wrote several more novels while there, including "All the King's Men."

Warren came to Yale in 1950. He taught playwriting here until 1956 and was a professor of English from 1961 (the year the University awarded him an honorary doctor of letters) to 1973. After a long hiatus from poetry, he returned in the 1950s to writing verse, receiving popular and critical acclaim and two more Pulitzer Prizes. Three years before his death in 1989, Warren was named as poet laureate of the United States.

The papers of Robert Penn Warren are in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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