Robert Penn Warren:: A Biography - Hardcover

Blotner, Joseph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394569571 ISBN 13: 9780394569574

Publisher: Random House, 1997

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

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 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0394569571
• ISBN 13: 9780394569574
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 585