Customer Reviews (3)

Warren's Poetic Canon: 554
John Burt has provided an extraordinary service to students, teachers, scholars, and readers of Robert Penn Warren's poetry. Among the 554 poems included in this volume are previously uncollected poems and an unpublished poem, "With or Without Compass?" (in the textual notes)--all neatly organized chronologically in versions that are explained logically and thoroughly in the section on emendations and in the textual notes. The Explanatory Notes section adds glosses to words and references that might otherwise be obscure to a younger audience. Well formatted, well thoughtout, well articulated. "The" volume of Warren's poetry to own, to read, and to re-read.

Truly comprehensive volume
I will leave it to others more qualified to sing the praises of Warren's poetry, and will merely add some vital information that is inexplicably left out of the books description above:this volume contains every poem published and unpublished that Warren ever wrote with the exception of his book-length poem "Brother to Dragons."It includes his earliest poems from the "Fugative" at Vanderbilt, the long and wonderful "Audubon: A Vision" and all subsequent books of poetry he published.Further, Warren was an constantly revising his poems, and the editor here includes Warren's final revised versions of the poems.Finally, Harold Bloom's introductory essay is a fabulous overview.In short,if you own this book and "Brother to Dragons" then you have ever word of Warren's poetry and you are set for a lifetime of enjoyment.Buy it.

Warren's poems are a triumph of the human spirit.
I find most contemporary poetic practice notable only for its miserly concern for the difficulties attendant upon the small, the domestic, the momentary--huge acreages felled only to tell us that someone built a fencein their backyard once, and their husband helped them and the bindweed grewup around it and that was symbolic of relationships enduring and such. I'mtherefore ensanguined by Burt's new collection (definitive enough, I shouldthink, to silence the shrieks of Robert Penn Warren harpies), which teachesus that bindweed can't "hold candle to chokeweed," that fencestend "to grow thick with unfencing menses," and that husbands aremeaningful only inasmuch as they "lung persevering into the guts ofCromwell."As a result, this collection--under Burt's sprightlyeditorship--provides a needed corrective; Warren takes an uncompromisingview of the suffering subject splayed upon the rack of history, and theresults are cheerful and life-affirming. This book made me realize thatthere's a reason for everything; I will recommend it to my co-workers. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (3)

Warren
Penn Warren offers a unique glimpse of southern culture in the 1940's.This collection is comprehensive and leave you ready for other books.

Highly underrated author.
Robert Penn Warren, The Circus in the Attic (Dell, 1947)

The back jacket of the book says, "These stories come from the pen of one of America's half-dozen great writers." Given the time period of the book's release, that was really saying something. Something accurate, but something nonetheless. Penn Warren (who won the Pulitzer two year's before for All the King's Men) wrote the stories in this book over the course of fifteen years. Most were previously published.

The book is framed with two novellas, the title story and "Prime Leaf," with a number of shorter works in between. As with most of Penn Warren's work, the tales are about depression-era and WW2-era life in the American south, people going on about their day-to-day business. A number of the stories deal with the same town, and the same characters pass in and out of them, so the reader gets the feeling of getting to know different aspects of the town as he goes from story to story.

Part of the magic of Penn Warren's work is the ability to simultaneously expose to the reader the quiet dignity of the proletariat and the basic stupidity of human nature. Not an easy thing to make the reader respect the people he's laughing at. But that's exactly what happens time and again in this book. The characters do dumb things for various reasons, but we always understand what those reasons are, and most of the time we can see how the character gets from the reason to the justification to the act without a problem. And while there's always a moral to be had, Robert Penn Warren is certainly not Aesop. The moral is there, waiting to be found, but the reader who's not interested in the morality of the tales is allowed to go off on his merry way and not contemplate the deeper meaning of what's here. That, too, is part of Robert Penn Warren's gift. *** 1/2

Haunting, lovely, and memorable
I have been a fan of Warren's writing for many years.He is known for his novels, yet in many of those the most poignant and moving parts are the inserts, the chapters placed there to highlight the main story.CassMastern evokes so much, that it is impossible to imagine AKM without it. Warren achieves much the samee here...while not every story is amasterpiece, at least 2, The Circus in the Attic, and Blackberry Winter,will linger long in the memory.These are stories of a different era,slow, warm, evocative, suggestive and delightful. ... Read more

Book Description
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."A distinguished poet, novelist, and historian, Robert Penn Warren wrote The Legacy of the Civil War for the centennial in 1961. Introducing this edition is Howard Jones, University Research Professor and chair of the History Department at the University of Alabama. His works include Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War, also available as a Bison Book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Good writing is always in style
As the centennial of the Civil War approached Life magazine asked Robert Penn Warren to write an essay on the impact the war had on America.Warren, a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and numerous other prizes accepted.This small book is the essay he wrote in 1961.While Warren never considered himself a historian, he had a lifelong love of history and published a biography on John Brown.His grandfather, who fought for the South while believing in Union, told him about the Civil War and instilled in him a love of history.

This essay is as fresh and new today as it was in 1961.Warren's thoughts on the war, what he calls "The Great Alibi" and the "Treasury of Virtue" are still accurate.This is one of the great essays on the American Civil War, the impact on American history and how it affects us today.The style of writing is interesting, intelligent and very easy to read.You will quickly be caught up in the logic even as you identify current positions and come to understand their historic importance.

Civil War Established America as a Country.
Robert Penn Warren, a noted Southern writer, is certain that our Civil War shaped modern America, the social institutions which had to take care of the freed slaves, domestic policies, and foreign interests."The Civil War is our only 'felt' history -- history lived in the national imagination and not just on paper. This is not to say that the War is always, and by all men, felt in the same way.Quite the contrary.But this fact is an index to the very complexity, depth, and fundamental significance of the event.It is an overwhelming and vital image of human, and national, experience."

It taking place so long ago and ended so disastrously with the death of Abraham Lincoln, I really don't believe it caused our failing economy, philosophy, and psychology.Far too many wars, most on foreign lands, have taken place since then to put all the blame on the ressurection of the slaves."There is no facet of our lives today that does not owe its present character in some measure to the Civil War."

The Confederate Commander in East Tennessee was General James Longstreet.The siege of Knoxville and Battle of Fort Sanders was disastrous for this area.Bridge burners to stop the railroad took place across East Tennessee.The campaign at Strawberry Plains was led by Colonel William P. Sanders, for whom the Fort on the UT campus was named.Bulls Gap, birthplace of Archie Campbell (HeeHaw fame) was pivotal for the northeast, as was Lick Creek Bridge and Blue Springs.

In Middle Tennessee, commandered by Braxton Bragg and John Bell Hood, Nathan Bedford Forrest reigned in Columbia, having been born a short distance away in Chapel Hill; Columbia is the birthplace of a U. S. President, James Polk,Thompson's Station and Fort Donelson on either end of Nashville had important confrontations.In Pulaski, Sam Davis was hanged as a Confederate spy; there is a statue on the Square and on Capitol Hill in Nashville.His home at Smyrna is near Murfreesboro.

West Tennessee was under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest, whom Sherman called, "that devil Forrest."There is a statue of him in Forrest Square on Union Avenue in Memphis.He started his campaign in Clifton on the Tennessee River where the federal ironcladheld sway, near Jackson, TN.At Shiloh, one of the nations's oldest and most pristine battlefield parks, General Albert Sidney Johnston led the Southern side and died (buried there 25 miles Northeast of Corinth, Mississippi, near Savannah, Tennessee.The Sons of Confederate Veterans have established a memorial at Salem Cemetery near Jackson and a small park at Davis Bridge, near Bolivar.

Robert Penn Warren was a Phodes Scholar at Oxford University in London and taught at Yale University, as did Richard Marius.He wrote JOHN BROWN: THE MAKING OF A MARTYR, THE CAVE, WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME, BAND OF ANGELS (made into a movie), ALL THE KINGS'S MEN which won the Pulitzer prize and made into an Academy award winning movie about Huey Long.He also wrote PROMISES (poetry, which won the Edna St. Vincent Millay Award of Poetry Society of America), SELECTED ESSAYS, TEXTBOOKS: UNDERSTANDING POETRY and UNDERSTANDING FICTION.He was truly as much a part of history as the Civil War of which he writes his meditation on the Centennial in this book.

Outstanding
Interesting little book, this.Costs next-to nothing and takes almost no time to read.But there's more here than most of the other spurious profundity published these days.

Warren, a Kentuckian whose grandfather fought for the Confederacy during that war, looks at the effects of the waron both North and South.Warren is harsh on the hypocrisy of the North andits "Treasury of Virtue" as he calls it.But he is no LostCauser; he is equally harsh with the South, with its "GreatAlibi."And Warren is scathing with those racists who believed(andstill believe)themselves to be the legatees of Jefferson Davis or Robert E.Lee.An essential book.

A miniature classic of historical interpretation
The noted poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren wrote several brilliant book-length essays on various subjects, including JEFFERSON DAVIS GETS HIS CITIZENSHIP BACK (which originally appeared in THE NEW YORKER) and INTEGRATION, but none better than this miniature classic of historical interpretation.In 1961, when LIFE magazine asked him for his thoughts on the centennial of the Civil War, he wrote this superb, thoughtful essay (originally subtitled "A Meditation on the Centennial").In an extraordinarily compressed discussion, Warren notes a dizzying variety of effects that the war and the policies it brought in its wake had on American society.His two most important observations have to do with the ways that the North and the South used the war as alibis.For the victorious North, the war was a "treasury of virtue" that excused generations of corruption, short-sighted public policy, and neglect of national interests; after all, we won the war and freed the slaves.For the defeated South, the war was "the great alibi" that excused every failure to grapple with a region's pressing social and economic problems.Warren never wrote better than in these eloquent pages; this book should be required reading for anyone interested in the Civil War in particular or American history in general.Its reappearance, with a fine introduction by Howard Jones (author of MUTINY ON THE AMISTAD and other excellent histories of the Civil War era), is cause for celebration. -- Richard B. Bernstein, Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School, and Daniel M. Lyons Visiting Professor in American History, Brooklyn College/CUNY (1997-1998) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Marathon of Poetry and Humanity
This is the third Robert Penn Warren book that I've read.The first was All The King's Men, followed by At Heaven's Gate.If I were to rank them, ATKM would be first followed by Flood then AHG.

If you're familiar with Robert Penn Warren's writing you will know that it is rich in poetry and deep in meaning.His characters have profound ideas and there is a large scope of understanding within which they express themselves.In this book more than in his other two that I've read, RPW's storyline is driven by his characters and their interactions and less from a sense of action and plot.While I don't clamor for a detective-style fueled-up page ripper, I think giving the story a bit more of an internal engine would have eased the demands on this novel's sometimes fatiguing characters.

The main idea and plot begin with a town that is being flooded to make room for a dam.After reading over breakfast a newspaper article about these plans, a famous filmmaker comes to the little town of Fiddlersburg to make a film.He is joined by one of Fiddlersburg's more famous progeny, and the local reunites with his roots.

The book brings us to understand that this little town breeds a dispossessed clan who cannot make connections with the outside world but are never free from the self-consciousness of their own insularity.

Flood could be one of the best books of our time.I say that it *could* because I found the book to be flawed in some respects.At times it was too opaque and idle in its dreamy meditation of the characters' experience and circumstance.Yet I got to know the importance of Place from which people come and continue to grow, and I felt a tangible loss as this connection was lifted away and the waters rose and the people began to lament.I think this is a great comment on modernity.

RPW has written another long and very good book. ... Read more

Book Description
Warren's first novel set in the tobacco wars of Kentucky in the early 20th century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

The Way It Was.
The author of ALL THE KING'S MEN wrote during a time when one could speak his mind and beliefs in an upfront way with dignity without critical interrogation as to his politics, religion, etc. He was not like Huey Long.Robert Penn Warren is a disguished Southern writer, born in Guthrie, Kentucky. Since he graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, we like to claim him as one of us. The first book of his I read was A PLACE TO COME TO. He went on to get degrees from University of California, Yale, and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1930.

He was a most prolific writer, some of the main ones I enjoyed were THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR, JEFFERSON DAVIS GETS HIS CITIZENSHIP BACK, JOHN BROWN: THE MAKING OF A MARTYR, BAND OF ANGELS (a movie was made of this), ALL THE KING'S MEN (won Pulitizer Prize for Fiction) and EYES, ETC.: A MEMOIR. He wrote a famous play called ALL THE KING'S MEN and many volumes of poems, most especially AUDUBON: A VISION, CHIEF JOSEPH OF THE NEZ PERCE, PROMISES (1957, which won the Pulitizer Prize for Poetry) and NOW AND THEN (his third Pulitizer Prize).

In 1944-45, he was the second occupant of the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress. He received numerous other awards for his writing of all sorts, as he continued to be a professor of English. He was one of a special group of Vanderbilt-educated writers, including some well known personages as prolific as he and as well-loved. He did an in-depth study of Melville. He was a controversial figure in his old age, but always the true blue Southern gentleman.

Night Rider
Percy Munn, a young lawyer and tobacco farmer in Kentucky, becomes a powerful member of The Association - a group of farmers who band together in an effort to break the economic monopoly of the big tobacco companies. It's not an easy fight, and soon The Association is acting like the KKK, coercing farmers into doing their bidding, resorting to violence if necessary. Munn's morals disappear. Warren explores this dilemma of a good man doing bad things for a good cause and the effect it has on his life pretty well. It's a powerful work in spots, especially in Warren's use of dialogue, but finally the story, and the book itself, seems too long and drawn out. A decent first novel, but Warren would do better work later on.

Flawed first novel, but hints of the better work to come...
Penn Warren ended up with a fine reputation, largely based on "All the King's Men" andpoetry andliterary criticism and his standing as a "modern" Southerner in the mid-20th century who could explain some of the past sins and virtues of his ancestors and neighbors. This first novel displays promise, but is not a compelling read page-by-page. It improves with each chapter after getting off to a slow start. For my taste, there is excessive Kentucky backwoods dialogue, some uninteresting digressions, and some failure to develop the major characters in ways that make one care deeply about their fates. Percy, the lawyer and main figure, idealistically but with some vanity, jumps into a tobacco growers union which plans to fight the big corporate buyers in order to get a fairer price for the crop. However, little-by-little, the association members begin to become coercive, and then to terrorize, those who won't join. A moral cause has become an immoral enterprise by the end of the book. Lives are taken or ruined, and the acts "justified" because the cause has to be saved due to the energies already invested in it. Meanwhile, Percy commits an act against justice to get a client free of a murder charge, an act against his innocent wife which destroys his marriage, and an act of murder to preserve his cause. He does not seem to know just how he sunk that low, or how to recover. He has an affair after his wife leaves him that seems loveless and even lust-less, yet it leads to tragedy for the father of the girl with whom he sleeps. In some ways the book is a replaying of the lost Confederate cause of the Civil War. I've stated some of its weaknesses, but I must say that I did want to stick it through. I came to care about Percy and wanted to find out how it ended, even though Percy is not fully likeable. There is one earlier review posted on this site, and that writer dissects the novel more skillfully than I can. I agree with his assessment. Worth reading if you have a special interest in Penn Warren, or in Kentucky, or tobacco history, or in how organizations with high-minded goals can be corrupted by forceful leaders or strained circumstances.

Sticks with you like resin from tobacco plants
Though it has now been almost 30 years since I last spent a fall afternoon cutting tobacco, spearing the stalks onto wooden staves, and hanging the staves into the curing barn, I still remember the smell of the plants, the stickiness of the resin, the glint of the cutting and spearing tools. This tenuous link to a much earlier time, the time of the tobacco wars that rocked rural Kentucky and Tennessee just before WWII, provided me with just a sliver of insight to the hard times Robert Penn Warren depicts in his first novel, Night Rider.

The protagonist, Percy Munn, is an affable but pliable young lawyer, happily married with a growing law practice when he is drawn into supporting "The Association," an ardent band of tobacco farmers, including doctors, politicians, and other men whom "Perse" admires and who in turn admire him for his oratory skills, leadership, and status. Percy, himself a tobacco farmer, and the association work to break the economic monopoly exerted by the big tobacco companies (those bastards were evil well before they started lying to the public about the addictive nature of their deadly products). But when legal and ethical means are not enough, the collective leadership starts down a slippery slope of coercing nonassociation members to join or else face the consequences. Bands of "night riders" fan out across countryside, first destroying the crops of those who refused their entreaties to join up, then property, until even the taking of human life is justified as a means to their end once they have made the decision to torch the tobacco warehouses in Bardsville and the other towns in the vicinity.

Percy Munn finds himself at the center, and as other men whom he admired peel off from The Association because their moral bearing will not allow their continued participation, Percy eventually finds himself cut off from his wife; men such as Capt. Todd whom he greatly admired; Lucille Christian, the woman who tries to save him from himself; and eventually the leaders of The Association who let him take a fall for something he did not do.

The story is properly characterized as a tragedy even though Percy Munn is not as noble a central figure as one might expect. His great weakness is that he attaches himself to causes without much thought of the consequences. In other words, he is an idealist, but a flawed one. Though Percy's fall is in part caused by his flaws, a series of betrayals---sometimes he is the betrayer and other times he is betrayed---also conspire against him. When loyalty becomes more a currency than a principal, tragedy is inevitable.

Robert Penn Warren captures the speech and mannerisms of this main characters effectively, but he does not develop three-dimensional characters, with the exception of Willie Proudfit, the hard-scrabble, nearly destitute farmer who is something of a mystic who lives life fully and with a fervor Perse cannot experience as he continues his spiral inward. The landscape and settings seem more like those rendered by wood cuttings rather than a photograph. Some of Robert Penn Warren's digressions meander for pages without bolstering the story, and at times the allegorical and naturalistic elements of the novel seem at war with one another.

If permitted, I might rate this novel three and a half stars. Reading Night Rider is a worthwhile book for wintertime reading, butit is not the finest work by the author who was to become the first Poet Laureate of the United States. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Disillusionment in early Kentucky
This novel, one of Warren's best, is set in Kentucky in 1825, and is concerned with power and redemption - and also what may or may not be the truth. Jeremiah Beaumont, an idealisticlawyer and promising politician, becomes disillusioned with his benefactor (Cassius Fort) when he learns that Fort has seduced a young girl (Rachel Jordan). Beaumont "rescues" Rachel and proposes marriage to her; she accepts only if he promises to kill Fort. But Fort refuses to fight Beaumont, and in an excellent piece of character development, Warren shows the betrayal and weakness this refusal instills in Beaumont. He and Rachel marry anyway, but when Beaumont reads a political handbill revealing the affair between Rachel and Fort, he thinks Fort wrote it to end his political ambitions. Now he kills Fort and is arrested. He escapes from jail and learns that another character, Wilkie Barron, had written the handbill, not Fort. Rachel commits suicide and Beaumont is murdered while trying to get the truth told.

Warren, as part of his narrative method, uses a number of letters and diaries and a manuscript written by Beaumont found amongst his papers as a means of conveying the story. But, of course, these represent only Beaumont's side of the story and may not be "the truth" at all. Warren's characters are strongly drawn; the ambitious and evil manipulator, Wilkie Barron, is particularly good. The suicide of Rachel is a bit melodramatic, though it's tempered somewhat by the unhappiness and trials she faces living with Beaumont. Warren based the novel on a true story. A highly regarded work, it's among the best of his novels.

Penn Warren's Other Masterpiece
This novel is one of the big sleepers in 20th century American fiction, and adds a twin peak to Penn Warren's other novelistic masterpiece, All the King's Men.

On the surface, the story traces the rise, career, love, and misadventures of Jeremiah Beaumont in the early days of Kentucky and of this republic.Simultaneously it is a meditation on the process of history, and its strangeness to the eyes and ears of later generations.Unlike All the King's Men, wherein there is 1st person narrative by a main character, Jack Burden, who fairly almost drowns in history, here the narrative is 3rd person and objective.We are immediately distanced by the narrator/historian, who holds in his hands the letters and court documents relating to Jeremiah, in the 1st sentence:"I can show you what is left."Indeed, the story is largely based on actual material discovered by Katherine Ann Porter and given to Warren.

From here a fascinating narrative opens as we are immediately dropped into frontier Kentucky with the young lawyer's assistant Jeramiah.The passion and violence of the setting is made palpable, along with Jeremiah's youthful lust and apparent idealism, and the manner in which they affect his relationship with his employer -- but to go into details would spoil this engrossing and fascinating story. The merit is the confidence with which Penn Warren engages the strangeness of this world, without the usual method in "historical fiction" of merely dressing up contemporary figures in old costume.These people are puzzles, and the burden of the text is to unwind them.Yet they are so alive on the page, so true, that we are able to follow deeply into their bizarre depths and the alien wonder of early America.

In the end, the reader will have lived in early western Kentucky and emerged back in the contemporary world stunned.Penn Warren's passionate engagement with the American psyche carries one through the several hundred pages effortlessly.The book is many things -- straight realism, philosophical speculation, moral tale, melodrama, psychological portrait.Finally, it is simply one of the few 20th century novels to take up the multi-faceted challenge of Herman Melville to plunge into the national heart, with no pre-established goal except to come back home with as much truth as two arms can carry.

Too Dark for My Taste
This book was in my library for a number of years and I had not read it. Most of my reading time was taken with non-fiction. Finally, I decided that any book by an American author that had received three Pulitzer prizes including prose and poetry, must be worth reading.

If fact, this book is very well written. The character development is excellent, dialog is as I remember it when working in the rural areas of Kentucky during summer vacations from college in the 50's. The plot is well developed and the story is interesting and thought provoking.

On the surface, this is the story of Jeremiah Beaumont and his larger-than-life difficulties. Beneath the surface, this is a story of integrity, morals, truth and justice. It is not a story of "hope". The final sentence pretty well sums it up: "Was all for naught? ... Read more

Book Description
"This is Robert Penn Warren's best book. . . . Cruel sometimes, crude sometimes, obsessed sometimes, the book is always extraordinary: it does know, and knows sadly and tenderly, even. It is, in short, an event, a great one."-Randall Jarrell, New York Times Book ReviewThe 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, this long 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 tale, whose poignant ending brings not only reconciliation among the ghostly figures but healing for Warren's persona as well. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Marvelous blend of history and artistry
In Brother to Dragons, Robert Penn Warren, former poet laureate and twice winner of the Pulitzer, combined the historical elements of the New Madrid earthquake and the murder of a slave by two of Thomas Jefferson's nephews with his love of poetry. This book has various "voices" relating the brutal events in verse, but history is only a vehicle for exploring the nature of evil and Jefferson's dream of the perfectability of mankind.

This is a marvelous rather experimental volume; it is both novel, play, and poem. It is grim; it is disturbing; it is absolutely wonderful. I highly recommend this work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A great novel
Penn Warren is best known for novels written much earlier (mid-century) but A PLACE TO COME TO shows that he was not alienated by changing times and his powers were not diminished late in life.There are numerous scenes and sequences in this novel which are as good as anyone could do, and other novelists would do well to study how Penn Warren handles them (in particular, the moments of pathos, which could easily have been soapy if they were not detailed and so deeply felt). Penn Warren was obviously very committed to the book and while his protagonist is not clearly autobiographical, he imbues the book with his life experience.The novel does not have an overarching message or theme, but it is a great read, and only a great writer could have produced it.

A novel of self-discovery

Jed Tewksbury relates the story of his life in this solid novel: his humble beginnings in rural Alabama; college (where he becomes an expert on Dante); the army; his first marriage to Agnes Andresen, a brilliant scholar herself, although with her he only feels lonely and distant (she dies of cancer); the restlessness and aimlessness that follows. And then there is Rozelle Hardcastle (perfect name for her), his high school sweetheart, a thrill-seeker whom he jilts foolishly at the high school prom. He meets her much later in life in Nashville, and they have a passionate affair during which Jed realizes his love for her is still there (sadly, nothing comes of it). Warren's novel is an old-fashioned narrative in which characters learn hard lessons about themselves - especially Jed, who above all learns that "every man has to lead his own life and has little chance of knowing what it means, anyway." This was his last novel (his 10th), after which Warren concentrated on his poetry. Not quite as fascinating or compelling as some of his earlier works, but worthy of attention anyway.

Great Writer, Good Story
This novel is the grandiloquent self-examination of the life of a poor southern boy whose superior intellect, his knack for language and letters, conveys him away from the poverty in which his family stewed.

It begins with the death of child Jed Tewksbury's drunkard father, the recollection of which develops into a party spoof, a personal stand-up comedy act, that gleans popularity for Jed at college gatherings and beyond.He discovers his abilities with Latin and literature, attracting along the way the attention of the town's one beautiful/smart girl -- but she's a fickle babe who falls for old money and simply strings Jed along for a couple of decades.Jed experiences some periods of simpering self-pity, but grows more mature as the story progresses.

I think Robert Penn Warren intended for this tale to exercise the same degree of power as All The King's Men, and all of the elements are present (great writing, compelling characters and vignettes, introspective details), but the final product simply doesn't deliver the same overall impact.

One interesting point:One episode features a horse-breeding interlude, which was virtually mirrored 20 years later in Tom Wolf's A Man In Full.Robert beat you to it, Tom.

' A PLACE TO COME TO'
eNTERTAINING AND IT SEEMS TO ME THAT IT IS A VERY MODERN APROACH OF ONE INDIVIDUAL, FROM A VERY MODEST NEIGHBORHOOD AND BEING VERY WELL EDUCATED AND MAKING HIMSELF INTO A VERY HEROIC FIGURE. ... Read more

Amazon.com
This is an exhaustive study of the life of poet, novelist, and Rhodes Scholar Robert Penn Warren, stretching from his early years growing up in Guthrie, Kentucky, to his death in Stratton, Vermont. Blotner reveals a man of maniacal energy and turbulent emotion, whose seemingly charmed life was laced with a strain of dark tragedy.This is the fullest account available of the author's life and a requisite read for those who desire a fuller understanding of his life and works.Book Description
Telling a story that reflects the main current of American literary activity, with many significant acquaintances adding richness along the way--including Allen Tate, Albert Erskine, Katherine Anne Porter, and Andrew Lytle--this biography offers an in-depth profile of Robert Penn Warren--the man and the artist. 16 pp. of photos. 544 pp. Print ads. 20,000 print. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Robert Was Controversial
A True-Blue Southern Writer of the Fugitive Group., October 24, 2006
The South Shall Rise Again Literary Style., August 24, 2005
Robert Penn Warren is a disguished Southern writer, born in Guthrie, Kentucky. Since he graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, we like to claim him as one of us. The first book of his I read was A PLACE TO COME TO. He went on to get degrees from University of California, Yale, and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1930.

He was a most prolific writer, some of the main ones I enjoyed were THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR, JEFFERSON DAVIS GETS HIS CITIZENSHIP BACK, JOHN BROWN: THE MAKING OF A MARTYR, BAND OF ANGELS (a movie was made of this), ALL THE KING'S MEN (won Pulitizer Prize for Fiction) and EYES, ETC.: A MEMOIR. He wrote a famous play called ALL THE KING'S MEN and many volumes of poems, most especially AUDUBON: A VISION, CHIEF JOSEPH OF THE NEZ PERCE, PROMISES (1957, which won the Pulitizer Prize for Poetry) and NOW AND THEN (his third Pulitizer Prize).

In 1944-45, he was the second occupant of the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress. He received numerous other awards for his writing of all sorts, as he continued to be a professor of English. He was one of a special group of Vanderbilt-educated writers, including some well known personages as prolific as he and as well-loved. He did an in-depth study of Melville. He was a controversial figure in his old age, but always the true blue Southern gentleman. Bill had his picture taken with him at Martin College.

"What is a man but his passion?"
The recent publication of Robert Penn Warren: A Biography by Joseph Blotner may very well announcethe definitive biography ofone of the most famous American men of letters, a work which is both eminently readable and thoroughly enjoyable, imitating to a great degree the work ofMr. Blotner's subject.

The work is readable because the biographer uses the strictly chronological method, introducing the book with a calendar of important events in Warren's personal and professional life and repeating relevant dates at the top of every page. The reader is guided from RPW's birth in Kentucky to a poetry-loving fatherand a school teachingmother through a lonely childhood when thefrail undersized youngster lived in a self-contained world of books. We learn how the 17 year oldlost his chance for a naval career at Annapolis, his fondest dream, when his younger brother flung a piece of coal over a hedge and hit RPW in the eye, the left eye which he would later lose to surgery, and how he entered Vanderbilt University and met John Crowe Ransom, his teacher, the first poet he had ever seen, his idol with whom he shared his own poems in private.

Aided by the vehicle of Blotner's lucid prose style, we travel with Warren as he wins assistantships, fellowships, and scholarships from Vanderbilt to the University of California to Yale and finally to Oxford. We watch him settle into married life, become editor of the Southern Review,and earn fame with his novel All the King's Men.

Like the best biographers, Blotner does not avoid the dark side of his subject.He shows Warren's poetic preoccupation with the loving but aloof father figure, a reflection of his own. He tries to explain Warren's attempted suicide in college as the result of an emotional breakdown because he had fallen so far behind in his studies. He describes the often heart-rending details of Warren's relationship with his first wife whose neurasthenic personality forced her to spend most of her time bedridden and the rest of it fighting withher husband. He devotes the latter part of the book to a detailed description of RPW's last years when, his body riddled by cancer, he wished for death, which arrived mercifully in 1989.

Besides being readable, Mr. Blotner's work is highly entertaining, made more so by his vast research and his way of scattering quotations from letters and works of RPW into the biography's running commentary. We see the human being, not the literary giant,in his letters to friends, such as the following written to Katherine Anne Porter when he was struggling with All the King's Men: "At times I feel that I see my way through the tangle; then at moments, I feel like throwing the whole damned thing into the Tiber." We learn where his passion always was when, being awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, thereby gaining long desired financial independence, he writes: "I've stopped writing anything I don't want to write. Poetry is where my heart is."

If there is anyfault to Mr. Blotner's presentation, it is that, like many other biographers, he has become enamored of his subject. He sometimes interrupts his story with subjective praises, such as, "America's preeminent man of letters, master of genres, prodigiously creative, heavy with awards and prizes honoring his genius, Robert Penn Warren was also that rare being, a genuinely good man."In this case, Mr. Blotner perhaps should not be blamed. RPW was, after all,the only writer ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for two genres, fiction and poetry, and twice for the latter. How many other writers excelled in so many genres, including essays, poems, novels, historical fiction, biographies?Perhaps Mr. Blotner's passion for RPW can be forgiven when we consider his subject's view ofart and life,"What is man but his passion?" (Audubon: A Vision). ... Read more

Book Description
Portrait of the tormented liberator by America's first poet laureate. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Part of the Problem
While one may appreciate the literary contributions of Robert Penn Warren overall, surely this early work is an unfortunate part of the problem that the 20th century view of Brown has been so warped and skewed.Warren not only sustained the regional biases of his background, but he did no original research and largely appropriated the problematic but unquestioned "facts" of biographer Oswald G. Villard, whose "definitive" 1910 work questionably presents Brown as a kind of principled murderer.Warren found that an easy thesis to turn his way.The bottom line is that this book offers no original research, only an interpretation that says more about the author and his times and prejudices than about the subject.The quality of the writing can be otherwise judged by literary scholars, but as a biographer of Brown, this is not a book I ever have reason to reach for. It's only important to RPW's career and is recommended for those wishing to study the author's life and times.However it is largely irrelevant to any serious biographical study of Brown and no one interested in learning about the abolitionist should start or finish with this book.

Non-essential for historical study
As a John Brown scholar and biographer, I have had to get a handle on which biographies are useful and relevant to my research.While one may appreciate an author's style, such as the case of Robert Penn Warren, it is all too apparent that his work lacks any biographical significance as a work of history.RPW contributed nothing new to the research; instead he appropriated the worst elements of Oswald G. Villard's thesis, and otherwise framed it in his cultural and ideological prejudice as a southerner of the early 20th century.Villard himself, though a liberal civil rights activist, was prejudiced against Brown because he was an extreme pacifist and the grandson of abolitionist Wm. Lloyd Garrison, and likely resented how Brown stole the thunder from his hard-working grandpa.His view of Brown as a well-meaning murderer is hardly trustworthy, yet it has been put to good use by many anti-Brown writers, esp. those writing with a southern ax to grind--from RPW to Otto Scott.The fact that C. Vann Woodward wrote the preface to this edition of RPW's bio is all the more interesting, since the former was one of the key mid-20th century scholars in skewing Brown's historical reputation.

There are many books on John Brown, and a number of them are worth purchasing if you want to learn about him.However, this work by RPW is better borrowed from the library or scanned over a cup of coffee at B&N.It offers nothing of real historical value, except to the whining, bitter progeny of the South who have yet to own up to the fact that their forebears not only lost the war, but lost it for all the wrong reasons.Historically speaking, I give it one star only because I cannot give it anything less.

And make no mistake, reader.There is a definite connection between the willingness of the "majority" population to acknowledge the immensity of the CRIME of slavery and the general unwillingness of the same population to give John Brown the salutation that he deserves, instead of endlessly comparing him to terrorists and psychos.

Good story-telling, but not to be used for history
For the past year I have been engaged in a lengthy research project on John Brown and his biographers.Robert Penn Warren's John Brown: The Making of a Martyr was written when Warren was just 24 years old, and, although it demonstrates the wonderful literary ability Warren would become famous for, the book should not be used as history; Warren's anti-Brown sentiments are obvious; his tone his extremely condescending, as he take numerous snipes at Brown throughout.Warren criticizes the work of previous Brown biographers, such as Oswald Garrison Villard, but that does not stop him from using Villard as his main source, even copying some of his words nearly verbatim.Warren does make some good points, though, like how Brown created his own martyrdom, and his prose is eloquent.Many readers go for this book because of how well told it is, but for the best, most complete, accurate, unbiased, detailed biography, read Stephen B. Oates' To Purge This Land With Blood.When it comes to research, leave this one alone.

Criminal crowned martyr
The Harpers Ferry raid was the ember that ignited the Civil War. It was also part of a conspiracy, hidden in history almost as much as it was at the time, involving wealthy, prominant Northerners. Among them were Stoweand even Fredrick Douglas. Brown himself was a horsethief, a murderer, anda meglamaniac. Among the evidence found on his person was the constitutionof the "new republic" he would usher in after Southern whites hadbeen slaughtered by his army of freed slaves, naming himself as the newprovisional president. This well researched book so completely debunksBrown as anything but a traiterous, intolerant tyrant that it is amazingthat even today he can be viewed any other way. This book will raise yourawareness to a brand new level, almost as much as it raises your bloodpressure. ... Read more

Book Description

Volume four of the Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren covers a crucial time of personal and professional rejuvenation in Warren's life. During the fifteen-year period spanned by this correspondence, he completed Brother to Dragons, Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, and Who Speaks for the Negro?As these titles suggest, these years were marked by Warren's immersion in American history and his maturing interest in race relations. They also saw his return to lyric poetry, after a ten-year hiatus, with the publication of the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Promises. Along with seeing the completion of some of his most successful work, this period was a time of momentous change in Warren's life, including his move to Yale University, his marriage to his second wife, Eleanor, and the birth of his two children. As a chronicle of Warren's thoughts on his family, his work, his friends, the state of literary studies, and the culture at large, these letters are invaluable.

Unlike many writers, Warren rarely drafted his correspondence with future readers and scholars in mind; he typically saved his prepared statements about the human condition and the state of the world for his poetry, fiction, and social commentary. His letters offer a candid and personal glimpse of Warren's relationships as well as his personal views on literature, politics, and social trends.Their recipients include Ralph Ellison, Allen Tate, Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, Eudora Welty, and Louis Rubin, as well as Warren's editors, reviewers, collaborators, and other friends.

Providing an unusually vivid and personal account of Warren's rich and fully realized life, these missives are equally revealing of his thoughts on the state of contemporary American culture during this dynamic time in American history. ... Read more

Amazon.com
This landmark book is a loosely fictionalized account of Governor Huey Long of Louisiana, one of the nation's most astounding politicians. All the King's Men tells the story of Willie Stark, a southern-fried politician who builds support by appealing to the common man and playing dirty politics with the best ofthe back-room deal-makers. Though Stark quickly sheds his idealism, his right-hand man, Jack Burden -- who narrates the story -- retains it and proves to be a thorn in the new governor's side. Stark becomes a successful leader, but at a very high price, one that eventually costs him his life. The award-winning book is a play of politics, society and personal affairs, all wrapped in the cloak of history.Book Description

Customer Reviews (171)

Possibly the best American Novel
Emerson said of Plato's Republic, it is more than a book it is a world. This is also true of Penn Warren's classic political novel. But the political story of the rise and fall of the demagouge Willie Stark is just a veneer for the real story. The real story is the struggle of Jack Burden, the cynical and emotionally reclusive narrator, to understand himself and his role in the chaotic world that surrounds him. This book is a probing reflection into the soul on par with Miller's "Death of a Salesman." The movie starring Jude Law and Sean Penn did not do it any kind of justice. A must read.

Overwrought and overwritten
This is an enjoyably turgid potboiler with large pretensions.The narrator's prose mixes tough-guy cynicism with over-the-top poeticizing.The author's literary ability is always in the foreground.Several stories, each entertainingly pulpy, are interwoven, except a historical romance that remains unrelated to the main plot.While basically chronological, the organization often makes better thematic than narrative sense.The weakness of the book is that almost all of it comes off as artifice and contrivance.Only Willie Stark and Jack Burden intermittently ring true.The other characters, especially the women, are props stuffed with clichés.The plots churn with coincidences and melodramatic events.And some passages are close to camp in their laughably extravagant rhetoric.

Carefully Balanced Melodrama with Fabulous Poetic Writing
ALL THE KING'S MEN has a rich mix of carefully balanced characters who help Jack Burden, the narrator, explore the paths he, his childhood friends, his colleagues, and his parents take through life. At this level, ATKM is a carefully wrought story, more about the tyranny of the past than the bare knuckled compromises of politics, with the character Sadie Burke contrasting with Anne Stanton, Willie Stark contrasting with Adam Stanton and Tiny Duffy, Jack Burden contrasting with Sugar Boy, and so on. But while all of these characters are fully realized, they are also somewhat predictable. It is for this reason that ATKM seems like a melodrama; once you get the characters, their stories fail to surprise.

Nonetheless, this novel is well worth reading, primarily because of Robert Penn Warren's fabulous style. I'm no expert. But most authors I read seem to use metaphors and similes to create a quick burst of insight or beauty. Yes, Updike, Chabon, McEwan and maybe a few others create occasional passages of descriptive writing with multiple elements that fit together in amazing extended metaphors. But Warren does this repeatedly, taking an idea and exploring it for 100 words or more. This, in my opinion, explains why ATKM has lasted: much of the novel is very fine poetic prose. Here's one example:

"In the morning it had stopped raining and there was the sun. I went out and saw the thin pools of water standing on the black ground, like sheets of isinglass. Around the japonicas, the white and red and coral petals, which had been shattered from the blossoms, floated on the blackly gleaming pools. Some of them floated with the curled edges upward, like boats, and around them other petals floated upside down or had shipped water, making a gay carnage as though a battleship had fired a couple of salvos into a fleet of carnival barges and gondolas in some giddy, happy, far-off land."

Warren's poetic style helps explain why ATKM is both a long book but a fast read.

This is MY review
Overall, I thought the story was okay.I am not much of a fan of Penn's prose, and this book dragged until Jack Burden retells the story of Cass Mastern.For me, this is where the book starts falling into place.Maybe I was set up for failure with this book because I keep seeing this novel being called "political fiction."As someone picking this up expecting "political fiction," you'd expect the story to focus on Willie Stark and in much more detail of his humble beginnings to his tragic downfall, but he is only a distant focal point in this novel as the story belongs to one of Stark's cronies, Jack Burden.I don't know WHY I'm supposed to give a flip about Jack Burden and after finishing the novel, I still don't give a toss for the character.There are so many sub-plots and interesting characters within the story that I was much more interested in than the big picture of Burden's personal "odyssey."I felt that some of the story was predictable (Burden's father) and some of the book just didn't seem feasible (the relationship between Stark and Anne Stanton).So all in all, this book didn't do it for me. I have read better.

Politics
Jack was a journalist living in the 1930s in the South.As a newspaperman he had the opportunity to follow the early political campaign of the idealistic Willie Stark, a farm boy who thought he could make a difference and agreed to run when some powerful men asked him.

Little did Willie know that he was a stooge set up to split the vote and guarantee a win to his opponent.Little did he know that nobody was listening to his earnest, figure-ridden speeches about how he would make the country a better place.Jack was there to help pick up the pieces when Willie finally found out what was going on, and he was there to witness Willie's rebirth as a fighter, who promised to come back to campaign on his own for the next election.

Years later Jack is no longer in journalism.Instead, he is Willie's right-hand man.He is the one who keeps track of the things Governor Willie Stark needs to get done.He is the one who digs up dirt on friends and opponents and puts pressure where pressure is needed.He is essential to the smooth running of Willie's personal and political life, and he is much reviled by many people for his role in the government.

In Jack's mind, though, Willie is a better politician than most.There is some corruption within his organization, but there is also much more good being accomplished than in past governments.Jack defends to his friends and himself that such good should and does overshadow the dark parts of his boss.As this book progresses, we are able to see how decent and moral people can be sucked into a somewhat immoral life, and how those who are immoral to begin with can find places to sneak into an ethical man's world.

I really liked watching the evolution of all of the characters in this book, and the changing relationships among them.It was interesting to puzzle through Willie's change from idealistic young man to hardened womanizer, or Jack's change from slacker student to dedicated blackmailer.I liked seeing where Jack and Anne's relationship went wrong, and I liked the stubborn way Adam refused to let his friendship with Jack go.

This book had some beautiful descriptive paragraphs, but there were times in which I felt I was simply wallowing in description, trying to wade through words in order to get back to the story. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A Character Study
This is a work to be carefully and reflectively read.The story itself is a simple one of a failed rescue attempt from a cavern.The various characters' lives which are written as sidelights to the main story are of what is of interest in the story.Unfortunately, to this reader at any rate, these rich characterazations are all too abruptly abandoned.Each one of these lost characters would be worthy of a novel in themselves.I feel as though the character Dorthy, for an example, is a well-developed character study but eventually is just left hanging.Worse yet, the main protagonist, Isaac, simply runs away.I found this to be most distressing.

Complex Characters, Complex Book, Complex Ideas
Here's a book that is becoming more and more rare... a book about complex people with complex motives.Warren's poetic novel is wonderful to read just for the phrasing at times, but the characters, their history, their thoughts and actions, and their interactions are what really brings this to the top of my short list.It's a book for a book group.So many ideas so close to the surface, without being absolutely thrown in your face.Without giving away the end, I can say that you see much of it coming, but you don't care.You want to read every word to see what Warren has to say about the connections and lack of connections between people.

I can't believe this is out of print!
I found this book in a used bookstore and just opened it up and started reading. Something about it got me hooked, and I just keep going. The novel is constructed brilliantly, with Warren providing large backgrounds for all of his charecters in the first 150 or so pages, and then the "experiences" of the different individuals caving in on one another. The end of the novel contains some of the most powerful dialogues scenes I have ever read. I loved this book. ... Read more

Book Description
Robert Penn Warren (1905?1989) excelled in three written mediums---fiction, poetry, and literary criticism---and is one of the few writers to be awarded Pulitzer Prizes for both his poetry and his fiction. With Cleanth Brooks, he inspired practitioners of New Criticism and revolutionized the way literature was taught and studied in the academy. His 1946 novel All the King's Men, a fictionalized account of Louisianan Huey P. Long's gubernatorial administration, remains the template for American political commentary in fiction.In 1985, Warren became the first U.S. Poet Laureate.

Conversations with Robert Penn Warren collects interviews with Warren, ranging from the 1950s to the 1980s, and provides perhaps the broadest swath of interviews with the acclaimed writer to date.Featuring interviews conducted by such acclaimed writers and journalists as William Kennedy, Bill Moyers, C. Vann Woodward, and Roy Newquist, this collection's depth and focus are remarkable.

Warren's critical acumen is present in every piece here, as he talks forthrightly about literature's place in American culture, the role of history in his novels and poetry, and the contemporary events that raged during his lifetime. Conversations with Robert Penn Warren is a rewarding look at a man whose life and literary career spanned most of the twentieth century. ... Read more