Robert Penn Warren’s literary career began before the publication of The Waste Land and ended after Robert Lowell and many poets of the generation following had died. Like Thomas Hardy, Warren has a distinguished reputation both as a poet and as a novelist, winning the Pulitzer prize in both genres (and twice in poetry). As with Hardy, his poetry, for which he was appointed the first poet laureate of the United States, is his principal claim to fame for those who know him best, but his fiction is better known to readers at large. He distinguished himself as well as a critic and as a teacher, coauthoring with Cleanth Brooks Understanding Poetry (1938), the textbook that taught two generations of college students how to read poetry and that symbolizes for the literary criticism of the present day that figment of the retrospective imagination now called New Criticism. Warren also was a considerable essayist on politics and history, and he made a mark as a biographer and as a dramatist as well. Few white Southerners of his generation thought as seriously or in as sustained a way as Warren did about the problems of racism during the last years of legal segregation of the races in the South and the first years of legal integration.

Growing up in Guthrie, Kentucky, a railroad junction on the Tennessee border where he was born in 1905, Warren was a precocious student (he skipped two grades in school) and was subjected to considerable hazing, including one incident, discovered by a recent biographer, in which local toughs actually hanged him. At the age of 15, after graduating from high school and studying an additional year in nearby Clarksville, Tennessee, Warren received an appointment to the United States Naval Acadamy in Annapolis, but an accident cost him the use of one eye and forced his parents to send him to Vanderbilt University instead.