Most Popular Books by Robert Penn Warren

Winner of the C. Hugh Holman Award A central figure in twentieth-century American literature, Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) was appointed by the Library of Congress as the first Poet Laureate of the United States in 1985. Although better known for his fiction, especially his novel All the King’s Men, it is mainly his poetry—spanning sixty years, fifteen volumes of verse, and a wide range of styles—that reveals Warren to be one of America’s foremost men of letters. In this indispensable volume, John Burt, Warren’s literary executor, has assembled every poem Warren ever published (with the exception of Brother to Dragons), including the many poems he published in The Fugitive and other magazines, as well as those that appeared in his small press works and broadsides. Burt has also exhaustively collated all of the published versions of Warren’s poems—which, in some cases, appeared as many as six different times with substantive revisions in every line—as well as his typescripts and proofs. And since Warren never seemed to reread any of his books without a pencil in his hand, Burt has referred to Warren’s personal library copies. This comprehensive edition also contains textual notes, lists of emendations, and explanatory notes. Warren was born and raised in Guthrie, Kentucky, where southern agrarian values and a predilection for storytelling were ingrained in him as a young boy. By 1925, when he graduated from Vanderbilt University, he was already the most promising of that exceptional set of poets and intellectuals known as the Fugitives. Warren devoted most of the 1940s and 1950s to writing prose and literary criticism, but from the late 1950s he composed primarily poetry, with each successive volume of verse that he penned demonstrating his rigorous and growing commitment to that genre. The mature visionary power and technical virtuosity of his work in the 1970s and early 1980s emanated from his strongly held belief that “only insofar as the work [of art] establishes and expresses a self can it engage us.” Many of Warren’s later poems, which he deemed “some of my best,” rejoice in the possibilities of old age and the poet’s ability for “continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth, a process that is the image, we may say, of the life process.”

John Burt’s Selected Poems of Robert Penn Warren is more broadly representative of Warren’s poetry than any previous selected gathering. More than two hundred poems from every phase grace the volume, a vehicle ideal for sampling—or soaking in—the finest of Warren’s rich output. With each poem, Burt has carefully located the version that constitutes Warren’s final revision. His introduction gives an eloquent overview of the poet’s career, touching on every published book of verse and highlighting significant lines. A “selected” collection in the truest sense, featuring several previously unpublished pieces, this treasure is at once new and familiar. At the heart of Warren’s poetry is a celebration of man’s intellect and imagination, his integral place within nature, and his relationship to time and the past; ultimately, joy coexists with the knowledge of life’s many mysteries, including its tragedies. Selected Poems, a generous survey and a convenient compendium, is the shining portal to this greatly gifted poet.

Warren''s first novel set in the tobacco wars of Kentucky in the early 20th century.

In these two essays, one of America''s most honored writers fastens on the interrelation of American democracy and poetry and the concept of selfhood vital to each. "I really don''t want to make a noise like a pundit," Mr. Warren declares, "What I do want to do is to return us--and myself most of all--to a scrutiny of our own experience of our own world." Indeed, Democracy and Poetry offers one of the most pertinent and strongly personal meditations on our condition to have appeared in recent letters. Our native "poetry," that is, literature and art, in general, is a social document, is "diagnostic," and has often been a corrosive criticism of our democracy, Mr. Warren argues. Persuasively, and movingly, he shows that all of "art" and all that goes into the making of democracy require a free and responsible self. Yet the American experience has been one of the decay of the notion of self. Our astounding success jeopardized what we promised to create--the free man. For a century and a half the conception of the self has been dwindling, separating itself from traditional values, moral identity, and a secure relation with community. Lonely heroes in a bankrupt civilization, then protest, despair, aimlessness, and violence, have marked our literature. The anguish of Robert Penn Warren''s own poetic vision of art and democracy is soothed only by his belief that poetry--the making of art can nourish and at least do something toward the rescue of democracy; he shows how art can be- come a healer, can be "therapeutic." In the face of disintegrative forces set loose in a business and technetronic society, it is poetry that affirms the notion of the self. It is a model of the organized self, an emblem of the struggle for the achieving self, and of the self in a community. More and more as our modern technetronic society races toward the abolition of the self, and diverges from a culture created to enhance the notion of selfhood, poetry becomes indispensable. Compelling, resonant, memorable, Democracy and Poetry is a major testament not only to the vitality of poetry, but also to a faith in democracy.

James A. Grimshaw, Jr., brings together for the first time more than 350 letters exchanged by two scholars who altered the way literature is taught in this country. The selected letters focus on the development of their five major textbooks--the rationale for selections, the details involved in obtaining permissions and preparing indexes, and the demands of meeting deadlines. More important, these letters reveal their attitudes toward literature, teaching, and scholarship. Providing insight into two of the most influential literary minds of this century, these letters show two men who were deeply involved in research and writing, and who were committed to a life of travel, conversation, and learning. Their zest for life and their love of literature explain, in part, their uncanny ability to persevere and to succeed. Yet their human qualities are also present in the letters, which bring Brooks and Warren to life as rare individuals able to sustain a deep, lifelong friendship. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren will help readers better understand the critical work of Brooks and the creative work of Warren. Students and teachers of American literature will find this book indispensable.

Confederate John Singleton Mosby forged his reputation on the most exhilarating of military activities: the overnight raid. Mosby possessed a genius for guerrilla and psychological warfare, taking control of the dark to make himself the "Gray Ghost" of Union nightmares. Gray Ghost, the first full biography of Confederate raider John Mosby, reveals new information on every aspect of MosbyÕs life, providing the first analysis of his impact on the Civil War from the Union viewpoint.

In his latest gathering of poems, Warren continues to work variations on his favorite subjects examining time, the elements, the gifts of nature, the blessed accident of fate and what they all mean to a man of advancing years and few illusions. Throughout, a "nameless apprehension" underlies the speaker''s reflections on "the mystery of time and happiness and death."

First published in 1965, this is a unique text in the history of the American Civil Rights Movement. Robert Penn Warren interviewed a wide range of African American leaders, activists, and artists across the country, among them Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and James Baldwin. Sections from the transcripts of these interviews are combined with the author’s reflections on the interviewees and the Civil Rights Movement as a whole to create a powerful oral history of this all-important struggle. A new introduction by David W. Blight places Warren’s book in historical perspective. " In this new edition introduced by the eminent historian David Blight, Who Speaks for the Negro? reveals a provocative admixture of history''s variance. Warren''s book is a burden of the past from which we cannot escape. It summons us to awaken a more vital national heartbeat of reparations for an American dilemma."—Houston Baker, Vanderbilt University

A dynamic backwoods lawyer batters his way into the governor''s mansion, where he uses his unprincipled charm to become a brutal dictator.

In his sixth novel, The Cave (1959), Robert Penn Warren tells the story of a young man trapped in a cave in fictional Johntown, Tennessee. His predicament becomes the center of national attention as television cameras, promoters, and newscasters converge on the small town to exploit the rescue attempts and the thousands of spectators gathered at the mouth of the cave.

First published in 1956, Segregation is a collection of Robert Penn Warren''s informal conversations with southerners in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Warren, who in his own writings often explored the theme of race in American life, traveled through his native region to talk with scores of individuals--taxi drivers, NAACP leaders, members of White Citizens groups, college students, preachers--to report their responses to the Court''s decision.

In the admixture of wilderness and elegant society that was 1826 Kentucky, Jeremiah Beaumont, a brilliant, imaginative lawyer, stood trial for murdering his benefactor and father figure, the politician Colonel Cassius Fort. Now all the documents are in hand to reconstruct Beaumont''s life story -- his crime, his trial, his ultimate sin and punishment -- and the historian-narrator of World Enough and Time sets about doing just that. Based on the famous murder case known as the Kentucky Tragedy, World Enough and Time is, like its precursor All the King''s Men, a fictional wonder that personifies history, philosophy, politics, and passion.

ufeffOriginaly published in 1958 by Random House, Remember the Alamo! is a children’s book intended for ages 9 and up. Written just three years following the acclaimed Disney miniseries, Davy Crockett at the Alamo staring Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen, the book is right out of the 1950s before “politically correct” entered our mindsets. Remember the Alamo! is the acclaimed classic accounts of one of the most thrilling moments in the history of the United States frontier. The battle for the Alamo was an epic event in the fight for Texas independence from Mexico. Davy Crockett, Colonel Jim Bowie and Colonel Travis are just three of the legendary and colorful heroes whose courageous and doomed defense of the Alamo against an overwhelming Mexican army led by General Santa Anna earned them immortality. Their valiastand and death inspired the rallying cry, “Remember the Alamo!” that inspired Texans to continue their struggle and ultimate win their independence from Mexico. As of this writing, he is the only author to have won the Pulitzer for both fiction and poetry.

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Thirty-seven of Warren''s poems written between 1976 and 1978, presented in reverse chronological order.

Adam Rosenzweig, a German Jew, wants to serve in the Union Army, but on shipboard to America, someone sees his deformed foot, and he has to escape from pursuers.

The second novel by Robert Penn Warren, author of the Pulizter-Prize-winning All The King''s Men, is a tour de force and a neglected classic.

Narrative and descriptive poems exemplifying the key elements are presented and analyzed.

Amantha Starr, born and raised by a doting father on a Kentucky plantation in the years before the Civil War, is the heroine of this powerfully dramatic novel. At her father''s death Amantha learns that her mother was a slave and that she, too, is to be sold into servitude. What follows is a vast panorama of one of the most turbulent periods of American History as seen through the eyes of star-crossed young woman. Amantha soon finds herself in New Orleans, where she spends the war years with Hamish Bond, a slave trader. At war’s end, she marries Tobias Sears, a Union officer and Emersonian idealist. Despite sporadic periods of contentment, Amantha finds life with Tobias trying, and she is haunted still by her tangled past. “Oh, who am I?” she asks at the beginning of the novel. Only after many years, after achieving a hard-won wisdom and maturity, does she begin to understand that question. Band of Angels puts on ready display Robert Penn Warren’s prodigious gifts. First published in 1955, it is one of the most searing and vivid fictional accounts of the Civil War era ever written.

Robert Penn Warren choses the best of his literary and critical essays. With thirteen in all, only six of them have been published in book form before.

In this elegant book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer explores the manifold ways in which the Civil War changed the United States forever. He confronts its costs, not only human (six hundred thousand men killed) and economic (beyond reckoning) but social and psychological. He touches on popular misconceptions, including some concerning Abraham Lincoln and the issue of slavery. The war in all its facets “grows in our consciousness,” arousing complex emotions and leaving “a gallery of great human images for our contemplation.”