Robert Penn Warren - Böcker

All the King's Men is considered the finest novel ever written on American politics. Set in the 1930s, this book traces the rise and fall of Willie Stark, who resembles the real-life Huey 'Kingfish' Long of Louisiana. Stark begins his political career as an idealistic man of the people but soon becomes corrupted by success.

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.

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."

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.

The significantly revised version of Brother to Dragons appeared in 1979, twenty-six years after the original. It is, Warren wrote, ""in some important senses, a new work."" Told in the distinct voices of characters long dead and now gathered at an unspecified place and time, the poem recalls events leading to and resulting from the 1811 murder of a young slave by Thomas Jefferson's nephew. ""R.P.W."" is the narrator of the versified tale, whose poignant ending brings not only reconciliation among the ghostly figures but healing for Warren's persona as well.

Winner of the C. Hugh Holman AwardA 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.

At Heaven’s Gate, Robert Penn Warren’s second novel, is a neglected classic of twentieth-century fiction. First published in 1943, it grew out of the author’s years in Nashville during a period of political and financial scandals much like those later so memorably portrayed his Pulitzer-Prize-winning All The King’s Men. Other formative elements, as he has said, "came originally out of Dante by a winding path." During the winter of 1939-40 in Rome, where the first half of the book was written, one of the most touching characters, a "Christ-bit mountaineer," and his part of the story literally came full-blown to the author in a typhus-induced delirium. At Heaven’s Gate is a novel of violence, of human beings struggling against a fate beyond their power to alter, of corruption, and of honor. It is the story of Sue Murdock, the daughter of an unscrupulous speculator who has created a financial empire in the South, and the three men with whom she tries to escape the dominance of her father and her father’s world. The background is the capital of a Southern state in the late twenties and the promoters and politicians, the aristocrats and poor whites, the labor organizers and the dispossessed farmers, the backwoods prophets and university intellectuals who are drawn into its orbit. Warren’s picture of the South is as fresh, dramatic, and powerful today as it was when the book was first published. Its plot structure is a tour de force.

In 1979 Robert Penn Warren returned to his native Todd Country, Kentucky, to attend ceremonies in honor of another native son, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, whose United States citizenship had just been restored, ninety years after his death, by a special act of Congress. From that nostalgic journey grew this reflective essay on the tragic career of Jefferson Davis -- "not a modern man in any sense of the word but a conservative called to manage what was, in one sense, a revolution." Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back is also a meditation by one of our most respected men of letters on the ironies of American history and the paradoxes of the modern South.

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.

Filled with entertaining anecdotes and personal reflections, this collection of twenty-four conversations with Robert Penn Warren provides an illuminating glimpse of the man and his thoughts on life and literature. Warren's wide interests—history, politics, technological change, teaching, race relations—span a period of more than three decades."Perhaps in no literary genre is an author more completely and accurately himself than in an interview," the editors note. "Every attribute of Robert Penn Warren—his folksiness, his wit, his honesty and openness—or, in short, the full man—is peculiarly adapted to the genre." Strongly apparent, for example, are Warren's feelings about his country. "I'm in love with America; the funny part of it is, I really am," he tells Bill Moyers. Even so, he does not shrink from criticizing America's shortcomings as his comments to Edwin Newman about the Civil War and the country's involvement in Vietnam make clear.Warren's asides are replete with biographical gems. To interviewer Peter Stitt he remarks that he never intended to go to Vanderbilt, but to Annapolis, and that once at Vanderbilt, his original chosen vocation was chemical engineering—a goal that changed after he enrolled in a literature class taught by John Crowe Ransom. Particularly revealing, however—especially to young writers—are Warren's reflections on the creative process. "Don't leave a page until you have it as near what you want as you can make it that day," he advises. When Warren speaks of his own writing career, there is no false modesty in his statements about his "trying" to be a writer or of "inching" along in the creative process. Rather, one sees a man who knows very well the very tentative and makeshift nature of literary effort.While offering views on other writers—from Homer and Shakespeare to Hemingway and Nikki Giovanni—Warren reflects as well on the role of criticism: "All the study about a writer or a work, all the analyses of background or ideas or the structure of a work—he purpose of all this is to prepare the reader to confront the work with innocence, with simplicity, with directness." And when asked if "poetic value" can be defined, Warren answers, "Well, if I could define it today, I wouldn't accept the same definition tomorrow."Robert Penn Warren, the country's first poet laureate and the only writer to win the Pulitzer Prize in both fiction and poetry, left no autobiography. Thus, Warren's conversations become one of the most important single sources for anyone seeking to understand his life and art.

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.

“A moving and disturbing work—one which goes beyond events, to brood upon their meanings.”—Samuel Hynes, New York Times Book ReviewIn the summer of 1863, Adam Rosenzweig leaves a Bavarian ghetto and sails for the United States to fight for the North in the Civil War. Fired by a revolutionary idealism inherited from his father, he hopes to aid a cause that he believes to be as simple as he knows it to be just.Over the course of his journey, Adam becomes witness to a world whose complexity does not readily conform to his ideals of liberty. When his twisted foot attracts unwanted attention on his voyage to America, he is threatened with return to Europe. He jumps ship in New York, only to be caught up in the violence and horror of the anti-draft riots. Eventually he reaches the Union Army, serving not as a soldier but as a civilian provisioner’s assistant. Adam’s encounters with others—among them a wealthy benefactor, a former slave, an exiled Southerner, a bushwacker and his wife—further challenge the absolutism that informs his view of the world and of his place in it.First published in 1961, Wilderness remains a profoundly provocative meditation on the significance of the Civil War and the varieties of human experience. This new edition of the novel includes an insightful introductory essay by James H. Justus, Distringuished Professor Emeritus at Indiana University and author of The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren.The Author: Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989)was born in Kentucky and studied at Vanderbilt and Oxford Universities. As a novelist, teacher, poet, and critic, he became one of America’s most celebrated men of letters and the only writer to receive Pulitzer Prizes for both poetry and fiction. In addition to Wilderness, his novels included All the King’s Men, World Enough and Time, and Band of Angels.

Warren’s first novel, set during the "tobacco wars" that raged in Kentucky and Tennessee in the early part of this century. Percy Munn is one of Warren’s innocent idealists whose delusions become murderous as he attempts to define himself by action in the unfolding violence around him. Southern Classics Series.