Biography Essay

Robert Penn Warren's reputation as one of the most versatile and talented of America's men of letters has grown steadily since the publication of his first work in 1929. Although he achieved instant recognition among scholars as a critic, poet, and essayist, popular acceptance of his work was not forthcoming until the 1946 publication of All the King's Men. As Leonard Casper and Charles Bohner have noted, this situation was the probable result of financial disasters at home and wartime conditions abroad. Warren's first book, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929), reached bookstores during the stock-market crash; Night Rider (1939) was published as Hitler entered Prague; and At Heaven's Gate (1943) was largely ignored at the height of America's military involvement in Europe during World War II. Over nearly sixty years he has published some fourteen volumes of verse interspersed with eleven books of fiction, a dozen books of...