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.

From Publishers Weekly
In chronicling the life (1904-1989) of a one-time literary lion whose works often failed to match his celebrity, Blotner has taken on a subject less accomplished and yet more challenging than the Southern titan at the center of his admired Faulkner. An anachronism while still active, Warren never equaled the great novel of Deep South politics he published at 42, All the King's Men. While groping for decades to outdo it, he established stronger credentials as poet and critic. Although he lived most of his adult life above the Mason-Dixon line, he drew his imaginative energy largely from his Kentucky and Tennessee roots, alleging that the North was "really just a big hotel to me... The South will always be my home." Balancing objectivity with sensitivity, Blotner takes on his subject's disastrous first marriage; his alcoholic and much-married "Fugitive Group" literary circle; his peripatetic academic climbing; and his overriding concern with income despite considerable royalties and monetary prizes. Dollars often dictated Warren's professional decisions, drawing him back again and again to the classroom and lecture circuit, although he complained that teaching chewed up his energy. Going well beyond Warren's writings in his documentation, Blotner has produced a biography likely to stand up for a long time, yet unlikely to resuscitate the reputation Warren once possessed as a jewel of the American literary establishment. Photos not seen by PW. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Blotner (Faulkner: A Biography, LJ 4/1/74) has written the first full-scale biography of Robert Penn Warren (1905-89), fellow Southerner, first U.S. poet laureate, poet, novelist, essayist, and teacher. Now best remembered for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the King's Men (1946), "Red" Warren, as his friends called him, was born in Kentucky and spent his youth in various Southern states, absorbing the history and poetry of that area, which later pours out in his work. Throughout his writing career, as he produced poems, novels, historical essays, and even drama, Warren was also an outstanding teacher. With his friend Cleanth Brooks, he coauthored the famous Brooks and Warren texts (e.g., Understanding Fiction, 1979) that have introduced so many college students to literature. In this remarkably detailed but uncluttered book, compiled from interviews with Warren, his family, friends, and contemporaries, Blotner has created both a scholarly biography and an affectionate portrait of this generous and talented Southern writer. For general and specialized collections.?Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ., CarbondaleCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, J.D. McClatchy
Mr. Blotner, who began this book with Warren's approval and help, has written an affectionate and adulatory narrative.

From Booklist
Following his masterful, two-volume treatment of the life and work of a divinity of American fiction, Faulkner (1974), Blotner turns now to a somewhat lesser star in the literary pantheon but with no less stellar results. His new biography of Robert Penn Warren is a major work, undoubtedly the standard biography for the foreseeable future. Blotner's smooth integration of literary criticism and life story builds with tremendous narrative drive; detail is copious, but each detail is as smoothly positioned into the whole pattern as the polished pieces of an exquisite mosaic. Born in Kentucky in 1905, Warren became not only an outstanding novelist--his most famous work in that genre being All the King's Men (1946)--but also a poet of great consequence; in fact, he was appointed the first U.S. poet laureate. Warren always ran with important, colorful literary types, and the accounts of his relations with them contribute considerable extra appeal here. Brad Hooper

From Kirkus Reviews
A competent but occasionally opaque biography of the Pulitzer Prizewinning poet and novelist. Some artists are done in by the bottle. Others fall to academia, economics, or indolence. But for Robert Penn Warren (190589) it was the sheer volume of his literary output--hundreds of poems, ten novels, several textbooks, and countless essays--that ultimately diminished his prodigious talent. Sometimes, particularly early on with novels such as All the King's Men or poems like ``Bearded Oaks,'' he managed to wring out almost- masterpieces. Too often, though, there was a feeling of exhaustion to his work, a d‚j… vu sense of old themes plumbed once too often. Blotner (Faulkner, 1984, etc.) would rank Warren here in the empyrean heights, but his case is not quite convincing. Nor is it helped by his slightly perfunctory treatment of Warren's novels or his failure to reach a full critical understanding of his subject. Blotner has fallen for the easy seduction of biography--the childhood on a Kentucky farm, the marriages, the travels, the maladies (Warren always seemed to be ill with something)-- forgetting that the artist is almost nothing without the art. As a member of the Fugitives, one of the southern literary renaissance's more active offshoots, Warren did much to shape modern American literature, though more through his teaching and his groundbreaking critical work (with the scholar Cleanth Books) than his art. The southern literary network was characterized by logrolling friendships and a broad base of average talent surmounted by a few lofty geniuses (most notably Faulkner). Still, Blotner has done a great deal of research and deployed it subtly, and we should welcome any biography that looks beyond the colossus of Faulkner to remind us of the South's enormous modern literary vitality. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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.

From the Inside Flap
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.

ANNOTATION

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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Robert Penn Warren published ten novels, sixteen volumes of poetry, a book of short stories, two selections of critical essays, a biography, three historical essays, a critical book on Dreiser, a study of Melville, and two studies of race relations in America. In addition, he had an active career as an editor and as a professor of English in America's foremost universities. With All the King's Men, he was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize. Two more Pulitzers followed (for poetry), and he won, as well, virtually all the other major awards for American writers. For almost six decades he was a dominant, influential, and much-loved author. This remarkable career is fully examined for the first time in Joseph Blotner's authoritative biography, in which Red Warren's life turns out to be far more interesting than most of us knew. It is a life that reflects the main currents of twentieth-century American literary activity, a life enhanced by important friendships with Allen Tate, Katherine Anne Porter, Andrew Lytle, Eudora Welty, T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, Albert Erskine - one of the great American editors - and many others.

FROM THE CRITICS

Megan Harlan

Robert Penn Warren may be a quintessential American "man of letters," but after wading through Joseph Blotner's big, redoubtable biography, you can't help but wonder if Warren might have held that title in the same way George Bush was considered a "résumé politician." It's not that Warren wasn't talented, and certainly his name is followed by a dizzying array of honors -- he won several Pulitzers (including one for his novel about politics in 1930s Louisiana, All the King's Men) and Guggenheims, he was a National Book Award winner and the U.S. poet laureate. The tough question is: Where does his work ultimately figure in the fickle, fruited plains of American literature?

Warren was equally prolific and prodigious as a poet, novelist and historian. Yet, unlike William Faulkner, the subject of Blotner's previous biography, the word "genius" is rarely bandied about with regard to his work (although he did receive a MacArthur "genius" grant). Nor does Warren's work inspire the kind of contemporary devotion that his close friend Katherine Anne Porter's does. Blotner's bio of this eminently accomplished writer is, well, eminently accomplished: meticulously researched, unerringly chronological (without so much as a theme-extracting introduction), voluminous and politely distant -- all qualities one looks for in a biography if one is a scholar. More general readers might need a bit more to keep them turning the pages.

One problem is that the arc of Warren's life -- he was born to a middle-class family in Kentucky in 1905, and died respected and prosperous at age 84 -- seems so placid and successful. He almost went blind in one eye as a young man, and he did attempt suicide (chloroform in a hankie) while an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University, which he chalked up to "ennui," an explanation Blotner basically leaves be. And his first marriage wasn't so hot, but his second, to writer Eleanor Clark, worked out pretty well. Overall, Warren comes off as a nice, well-adjusted guy and a very talented and devoted writer, instead of as a Hemingway plagued by fascinating demons.

No, what Robert Penn Warren appears to be -- at least, in Blotner's book -- is the original academic writer. Shuffling from one prestigious university position to the next, Warren lived a comfortable, fortuitous, but somewhat bland, bourgeois life. That thumbnail sketch, coupled with Blotner's lack of psychological or personal insight into his subject, makes the biography resemble an enormously detailed curriculum vitae. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

In chronicling the life (1904-1989) of a one-time literary lion whose works often failed to match his celebrity, Blotner has taken on a subject less accomplished and yet more challenging than the Southern titan at the center of his admired Faulkner. An anachronism while still active, Warren never equaled the great novel of Deep South politics he published at 42, All the King's Men. While groping for decades to outdo it, he established stronger credentials as poet and critic. Although he lived most of his adult life above the Mason-Dixon line, he drew his imaginative energy largely from his Kentucky and Tennessee roots, alleging that the North was "really just a big hotel to me... The South will always be my home." Balancing objectivity with sensitivity, Blotner takes on his subject's disastrous first marriage; his alcoholic and much-married "Fugitive Group" literary circle; his peripatetic academic climbing; and his overriding concern with income despite considerable royalties and monetary prizes. Dollars often dictated Warren's professional decisions, drawing him back again and again to the classroom and lecture circuit, although he complained that teaching chewed up his energy. Going well beyond Warren's writings in his documentation, Blotner has produced a biography likely to stand up for a long time, yet unlikely to resuscitate the reputation Warren once possessed as a jewel of the American literary establishment. Photos not seen by PW. (Feb.)

Library Journal

Blotner (Faulkner: A Biography, LJ 4/1/74) has written the first full-scale biography of Robert Penn Warren (1905-89), fellow Southerner, first U.S. poet laureate, poet, novelist, essayist, and teacher. Now best remembered for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the King's Men (1946), "Red" Warren, as his friends called him, was born in Kentucky and spent his youth in various Southern states, absorbing the history and poetry of that area, which later pours out in his work. Throughout his writing career, as he produced poems, novels, historical essays, and even drama, Warren was also an outstanding teacher. With his friend Cleanth Brooks, he coauthored the famous Brooks and Warren texts (e.g., Understanding Fiction, 1979) that have introduced so many college students to literature. In this remarkably detailed but uncluttered book, compiled from interviews with Warren, his family, friends, and contemporaries, Blotner has created both a scholarly biography and an affectionate portrait of this generous and talented Southern writer. For general and specialized collections.-Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ., Carbondale

Kirkus Reviews

A competent but occasionally opaque biography of the Pulitzer Prizewinning poet and novelist.

Some artists are done in by the bottle. Others fall to academia, economics, or indolence. But for Robert Penn Warren (1905-89) it was the sheer volume of his literary output—hundreds of poems, ten novels, several textbooks, and countless essays—that ultimately diminished his prodigious talent. Sometimes, particularly early on with novels such as All the King's Men or poems like "Bearded Oaks," he managed to wring out almost- masterpieces. Too often, though, there was a feeling of exhaustion to his work, a déjô vu sense of old themes plumbed once too often. Blotner (Faulkner, 1984, etc.) would rank Warren here in the empyrean heights, but his case is not quite convincing. Nor is it helped by his slightly perfunctory treatment of Warren's novels or his failure to reach a full critical understanding of his subject. Blotner has fallen for the easy seduction of biography—the childhood on a Kentucky farm, the marriages, the travels, the maladies (Warren always seemed to be ill with something)—forgetting that the artist is almost nothing without the art. As a member of the Fugitives, one of the southern literary renaissance's more active offshoots, Warren did much to shape modern American literature, though more through his teaching and his groundbreaking critical work (with the scholar Cleanth Books) than his art. The southern literary network was characterized by logrolling friendships and a broad base of average talent surmounted by a few lofty geniuses (most notably Faulkner).

Still, Blotner has done a great deal of research and deployed it subtly, and we should welcome any biography that looks beyond the colossus of Faulkner to remind us of the South's enormous modern literary vitality.