Robert Penn Warren:: A Biography

by Joseph Blotner

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394569571
• ISBN13: 9780394569574
• Release Date: February 1997
• Publisher: Random House (NY)
• Length: 585 Pages
• Weight: 2.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 6.7" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

"What is a man but his passion?"

The recent publication of Robert Penn Warren: A Biography by Joseph Blotner may very well announce the definitive biography of one 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 of Mr. 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 father and a school teaching mother through a lonely childhood when the frail undersized youngster lived in a self-contained world of books. We learn how the 17 year old lost 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 with her 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