SOURCE: Eisinger, Chester E. “Robert Penn Warren: The Conservative Quest for Identity.” In Robert Penn Warren: Critical Perspectives, edited by Neil Nakadate, pp. 31-2. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981.

In the following excerpt, Eisinger outlines the defining characteristics of Warren's fiction and contends that “Blackberry Winter” is among the more meaningful of the author's short stories.

The conservative southern imagination may be best summed up, for the 1940's, in the work of Robert Penn Warren. He belongs to this period, as Faulkner does not. But, like Faulkner, he is a writer of such considerable achievement that he cannot be totally contained within a formula. Or perhaps it would be better to say that Warren reveals, better than any other writer except Faulkner, the potentials for a universal interpretation of experience that lie in southern conservatism.

The particularities of Warren's revisionist and conservative position may be framed in a...