A Southerner by birth and by nature, Robert Penn Warren was born in 1905 in Guthrie, Kentucky and died of cancer at his Vermont vacation home in September, 1989. His legacy includes major contributions to fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism. In a tribute to Warren in the Kenyon Review, a journal he helped establish, editor David Lynn commemorated "the end of a miraculous career of an American laureate." Other than, perhaps, [Ralph Waldo] Emerson," Lynn continues, "no other American has ever stood among the first rank in so many genres."

Not only did Warren write literature (he published nearly three dozen books), but he changed the way literature was taught and studied. His books (written with Cleanth Brooks), Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction, "influenced, in Lynn's words, "a generation (and more) of students and teachers," and his essays on other writers "remain models of level- headed judgment, insight...