Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Todd County, Kentucky,
in 1905. He entered Vanderbilt University in 1921, where he became the youngest
member of the group of Southern poets called the Fugitives, which included
John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Merrill Moore. Warren's
first poems were published in The Fugitive, a magazine which the group published
from 1922 to 1925. The Fugitives were advocates of the rural Southern agrarian
tradition and based their poetry and critical perspective on classical aesthetic
ideals. From 1925 to 1927, Warren was a teaching fellow at The University
of California, where he earned a master's degree. He studied at Oxford as
a Rhodes Scholar and returned to the United States in 1930. He taught at Vanderbilt,
Louisiana State, The University of Minnesota, and Yale University. With Cleanth
Brooks, he wrote Understanding Poetry (1938), a textbook which has
widely influenced the study of poetry at the college level in America.
Though regarded as one of the best poets of his generation, Warren was better known as a novelist and received tremendous recognition for All the King's Men, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1947. As his southern background was exchanged for a later life spent in New England, with homes in Connecticut and Vermont, Warren's youthful conservatism eventually gave way to more liberal views, aesthetically and socially. At the same time, his poetry became less formal and more expansive, garnering even higher critical acclaim: his Promises: Poems, 1954-1956 won the Sidney Hillman Award, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1979 he earned a third Pulitzer Prize, this time for Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978. Warren served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1972 until 1988, and was appointed the first U.S. Poet Laureate in 1985. He died in 1989.