Robert Penn Warren: a bibliographical survey, 1986-1993.
Eller, Jonathan R. ; Smith, C. Jason
During a 1985 interview commemorating his eightieth birthday, Robert
Penn Warren was quickly challenged for a definition of time. The
response was vintage Warren - he promptly substituted a better way of
asking the question:
An old question I encountered first in conversation with a professor
of medieval literature. He said, "What is 'now'? What
does 'now' mean? 'Now' is all that is passing. Have
you felt a 'now'?" He was quoting a passage from St.
Augustine, from The Confessions. (Vitale, "Conversation," p.
5)
In preparing this survey to cover the secondary scholarship on Warren
since 1985, we felt the passing of the "now" with great
intensity, for these seven brief years document Warren's
culminating honor of the Poet Laureateship, the sad occasion of his own
passing, and the tributes, reminiscences, and reassessments that
inevitably follow the transition of proven genius into history.
Indeed, Warren's history is deeply intertwined with the fabric
of America in this century. He lived all but fifteen of these hundred
years, and his passing greatly diminished the nation's living
literary legacy. Prizes provide a benchmark of sorts. With Warren's
death, only one Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist-John Hersey - remained
from the period before 1948, when the "Novels" prize category
was broadened to "Fiction." Surprisingly, only three Pulitzer
poets (Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wilbur, and Stanley Kunitz) remain from
the 1950s, the time of Warren's first poetry Pulitzer. And the more
recent loss of Albert Erskine and Cleanth Brooks reminds us of
Warren's pivotal position among those few who both shaped and
chronicled modern American literature at mid-century. But time's
arrow has also fashioned a fourth generation of scholars who now write
on Warren's creative and critical achievements, and it is to the
work of these scholars and their mentors that we now attend.
As James A. Grimshaw observes, the critical record of the early 1980s
revealed a strong new interest in the autobiographical elements of
Warren's later work, a shifting critical focus from Warren's
fiction to his poetry, and the beginning of a trend to read Warren
within a larger cultural context (Grimshaw, "Biographical
Trends," pp. 51-52). The critical record of the last seven years
confirms a continued strong interest in Warren's life as expressed
in his work, but more and more the biographical criticism focuses on
Warren's lifelong pursuit of truth and turns to a broad range of
surviving biographical materials to illuminate his search for
self-knowledge. The earlier trickle of cultural criticism has become a
stream, revealing much about Warren's search for philosophical and
historical truths about America. Given Warren's great final period
of achievement in poetry, it is not surprising that the earlier trend
toward a study of Warren's poetry has led to a strong interest in
the late poems as well as an impulse to trace the developing stages of
Warren's poetry over his entire lifetime. In this essay we have
tried to highlight much of the work within these categories and to
provide a list of the publications on Warren appearing since 1985.
Primary Publications: An Overview
Warren's own publishing events of this period serve as preamble
to the survey of secondary work. Four book titles by Warren have
appeared since 1985, beginning with the reminiscent Portrait of a Father
(Southern Review, 23.1 (1987), rpt. University Press of Kentucky, 1988),
and the privately printed Six Poems (Newton, Iowa: Tamazumchale, 1987),
which gathers six of Warren's previously published nature poems. A
Robert Penn Warren Reader (Random House, 1987; Vintage, 1988) and New
and Selected Essays (Random House, 1989), both conceived and edited by
the late Albert Erskine, provided a much-needed longer view of
Warren's career just as that career came to a close. New and
Selected Essays includes eight of Warren's most famous critical
pieces, and, although five of the essays are first collected here, none
are new. In addition to these titles, the Southern Quarterly published
posthumously "The Dream of a Driller" and "Munk,"
two early short stories from Warren's student days.
Warren's shorter nonfiction publications include his
introduction to The Essential Melville (1987) and reprints of "Why
Do We Read Fiction?" in the Saturday Evening Post (July-August
1986), and, as "On Reading Fiction," in the Chronicle of
Higher Education (October 4, 1989). Warren's critical commentary on
his own short fiction is collected in Joseph Millichap's Robert
Penn Warren: A Study of the Short Fiction (1992). The fiftieth
anniversary issue of the Southern Review (22 [January 1986]) contains
"The Origin of the Southern Review," a reminiscence co-authored with Cleanth Brooks. Four significant letters from the
fifty-year Brooks-Warren correspondence were recently edited by James A.
Grimshaw and published as Robert Penn Warren/Cleanth Brooks: Friends of
Their Youth (Lexington, Kentucky: King Library Press, 1993).
Readership, both scholarly and popular, has kept much of the earlier
canon in print and stimulated new editions of a number of prose titles.
Three special editions of All the King's Men have appeared:
(Limited Editions Club, 1989, which includes a new introduction by
Warren; Collector's Reprint, 1990; Franklin Library, 1990), along
with a "Modern Classic" printing (1990) of the HBJ trade
edition. Laurel has marketed a new edition of A Place to Come To (1986),
and J. S. Sanders (Nashville, Tennessee) has published first edition
"reprints" of Night Rider (1992), John Brown (1993), and World
Enough and Time (1994) as part of the Southern Classics Series.
A number of exciting archival developments complement these final
publishing events. Yale's 1985 purchase of the Robert Penn Warren
Deposit in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library became fully
accessible to scholars in 1991 with the publication of William K.
Finley's The Robert Penn Warren Papers, a finding list with a very
useful introduction. The late 1980s saw the chartering of an author
society (The Robert Penn Warren Circle) and the establishment of a
Warren Center at Western Kentucky University. Warren's hometown of
Guthrie subsequently established the Warren Birthplace Museum, and in
1993, the Warren family graciously donated his personal library to
Western Kentucky University. Family members also helped dedicate the
facility for Warren's library at the University's museum
during the combined annual meetings of the Center and Circle in 1994.
Secondary Publications: A Survey
In the mid-1980s, Grimshaw identified eight collections of essays and
four full-length studies newly published during the first half of the
decade (Grimshaw, "Note," pp. 121-122). Since that time,
twelve more volumes devoted to Warren have reached print. One of these
is essentially a primary work - Talking with Robert Penn Warren (1990)
is a compilation of Warren interviews edited (rather heavily and not
always with a full discussion of rationale) by Floyd C. Watkins, John T.
Hiers, and Mary Louise Weaks. This volume joins Watkins's and
Hiers's Robert Penn Warren Talking: Interviews 1950-1978 (1980) in
documenting four decades of Warren's spoken commentary.
In contrast to the production of the early 1980s, only four of the
remaining eleven books are collections of essays, including two volumes
of previously published materials edited and introduced by Harold Bloom.
Bloom's Robert Penn Warren (1986) is part of the Chelsea House
Modern Critical Views series, while his Robert Penn Warren's
"Ill the King's Men" (1987) is a more specialized survey
of criticism prepared for Chelsea House's Modern Critical
Interpretations series. These collections make available a wide
selection of earlier work on Warren, but, since the contents fall
outside our time period, we will note them in our checklist without
discussing them here. The exception is John Burt's fine essay on
World Enough and Time, first published in the Robert Penn Warren volume
as the closing essay and subsequently developed as a chapter in
Burt's 1988 study of value systems in Warren's novels and
poems.
The remaining two collections contain newly solicited essays on
Warren. The essays in James A. Grimshaw's Time's Glory (1986)
were vetted by a panel of distinguished Warren scholars and colleagues,
and selected on individual merit rather than any orchestrated plan of
representation. Dennis Weeks's wide-ranging collection of essays,
"To Love So Well the World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert
Penn Warren (1992), grew out of the Robert Penn Warren Memorial
Conference held at Saint Louis University in 1991 and owes a great deal
to the distinguished scholars (Cleanth Brooks, Walter Ong, and Albert
Montesi) involved in that celebration. Student involvement in that
conference is reflected in the essay collection, which begins with
contributions by established Warren critics and concludes with a section
of graduate-student essays by those we have already referred to as the
"fourth generation" of Warren scholars.
Eight partial books or book chapters on Warren appeared during the
first half of the 1980s; since then, eighteen books with significant
sections on Warren have reached print, while two major journals have
devoted posthumous issues to Warren. The January 1990 issue of the
Southern Review opens with a special section of four personal
reminiscences on Warren by Cleanth Brooks, Donald E. Stanford, Lewis P.
Simpson, and James Olney. The Summer 1993 Southern Quarterly is a
special issue titled The Great Dragon Country of Robert Penn Warren and
contains eight more critically focused studies of Warren by R. W. B.
Lewis, James H. Justus, James A. Grimshaw, and others. The Sewanee
Review, another journal with a long-standing professional association
with Warren, published tributes by Cleanth Brooks, Louis D. Rubin and
Walter Sullivan. Other significant reminiscent tributes were published
during the year following Warren's death by Robert Drake (Christian
Century) and James A. Grimshaw (Gettysburg Review). Dennis Weeks's
festschrift volume leads with Cleanth Brooks's "Homage to R.
P. Warren," which eloquently summarizes Warren's drive for the
hard truths about the individual and the nation. These personal essays
fill out a valuable sequence of biographical insights on Warren's
life and times by those who, after his own family, knew him best.
Not surprisingly, interest in Warren's life and in the
autobiographical elements of his work continues to engage scholars. In
his festschrift essay "RPW and TSE," Victor Strandberg
identifies biographical parallels with Eliot's life as he tracks
the development of Warren's modernist and post-modernist
tendencies. Warren's professional relationships with other writers
have also continued to interest scholars. Darlene Unrue's
"Katherine Anne Porter and The Southern Review" finds that
both Warren and Cleanth Brooks were open-minded editors who kept their
art and politics separate. Fairness was their rule, and the consequences
of this policy had an enormous impact on Southern literature well after
the Southern Review became a wartime casualty. In a similar way, M.
Thomas Inge carefully defines the Fugitive and Agrarian movements, and
corrects long-standing misconceptions about the activities of Warren,
Tate, Davidson and Ransom in both groups. More than one critic looks
forward with great interest to Joseph Blotner's authorized
biography of Warren, which draws on the large body of correspondence and
manuscripts now available at Yale, Vanderbilt, Western Kentucky
University, and the University of Kentucky to tell the full story of his
life.
Many of the biographical essays are reminiscent. Warren knew scholars
and teachers, was one of them all his life, and a refreshingly large
proportion of the scholars who write about him knew Warren personally.
George Core's two articles on Warren focus on the autobiographical
aspects of his poetry, and Core (like many others) looks to
Warren's late memoir Portrait of a Father for clues to
Warren's private assessment of his own fatherhood. In "Parents
and Children in RPW's Autobiography," James Olney identifies
ways that Warren's poetry can reveal the impact of parents, wife,
and children in his life. Lewis Simpson begins "The Loneliness
Artist" with a narrative tour of Warren's three Louisiana
homes (from the LSU years) and goes on to identify Warren's
description of poetry as "shadowy autobiography" as a way of
approaching Warren's sense of exile in his relationship with the
South. In 1987, Jay Parini conducted one of Warren's last published
interviews, a session which yielded extensive autobiographical
reminiscence. In two essays, Will Fridy explores the role of memory in
two stories and a poem ("American Portrait: Old Style"),
working from interviews with the surviving subjects and giving due
respect to Warren's own admonition not to forget that "a high
percentage of oral history as [most] fiction is lies - just like all
history" (Fridy, "Peering," p. 69).
In fact, Warren's "unrelenting search for truth through
self-knowledge," identified by Grimshaw as an early 1980s focus of
biographical study, continues to draw attention; but much of the
late-1980s criticism places Warren's search for truth in a larger
historical and philosophical context of American identity. In
"William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and the Law,"
Christopher Waldrep turns to the dramatic courtroom scenes of the
early-century Kentucky tobacco wars in his discussion of Warren's
tendency to see Southern law and order as at times unable to discover
the true relations of events. As M. Thomas Inge points out in his
chapter on "Robert Penn Warren's American Novel of
Ideas," Warren was well-versed in American history and philosophy,
and any study of his works must in some way deal with the interaction of
American idealistic and pragmatic impulses in his fictional characters
or poetic personae. Robert Feldman's study of "Responsibility
in Crisis" in All the King's Men finds that politics is a
frame for what Warren calls "the deeper concerns" of
determinism and free will, action and inaction, truth and repression.
Malcolm O. Magaw sees A Place to Come To as an extended intellectual
search for meaning that touches on the existential. In his study of the
problematic final section of World Enough and Time, Jim Perkins argues
that the concluding section is mythological and works, as Warren defines
myth in his essay on Ransom, as "a construct that expresses a truth
and affirms a value." Conversely, Richard G. Law sees World Enough
and Time as a skeptical statement of the search for knowledge and truth,
a search which only defeats the imagination. William Finley turns to the
disquieting images of evil and destruction in "Ballad of a Sweet
Dream of Peace" to illustrate how Warren comes to the conclusion
that while reality is truth, we do not know its name. As Mark Miller
observes in his essay "Knowledge and the Image of 'Billie
Ports'," the difficulty of defining truth becomes a
"truth" in Warren's work.
The fact that this search for truth in an American historical and
philosophical context is of interest to critics is very apparent in the
longer studies. It is no coincidence that three of the seven book-length
studies of Warren include the modifier "American" in their
titles. In Robert Penn Warren and the American Imagination and two
excellent companion articles, Hugh Ruppersburg focuses on the long
historical/philosophical poems (Brother to Dragons, Audubon, and Chief
Joseph of the Nez Perce) and his extended Civil Rights essays of the
1950s and 1960s to explore the tensions between national conscience and
national destiny, idealism and pragmatism, and free will and determinism
that led Warren to view American history as both inevitable process and
high drama. In The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren, Bedford Clark
examines the first thirty years of Warren's work from an historical
perspective that allows us to trace more readily the development of
Warren's interwoven vision of America's grandeur and her
liabilities. John Burt works through examples from all Warren's
chosen genres to track his basic ambivalence toward the ideal in any
system of values, an ambivalence based on the dual
transcendent/destructive consequences of an ideal vision. Burt's
Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism prompted two excellent
review-essays (included in the review section of our checklist) by
Cleanth Brooks and Bedford Clark, critically significant in their own
right. These three books join James Justus's earlier study, The
Achievement of Robert Penn Warren (1981), as valuable companions to the
full range of Warren's creative and critical output.
In his later years, Warren gave poetry the right of way over fiction,
and the resulting tendency of scholars to focus on the poems continues
in recent criticism. This observation by no means diminishes the
valuable contribution of a number of fine studies of Warren's
fiction. Robert M. Davis and Joseph R. Millichap have produced
complementary studies of All the King's Men as novel and film.
Davis focuses on the limitations of Robert Rossen's film version,
while Millichap uses archival develops a careful textual reading to
reveal how photographic and movie images work in the novel itself. On a
larger scale, Millichap's Robert Penn Warren: A Study of the Short
Fiction adds a much-needed study of Warren's stories to
Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction Series. More recently, Twayne
added Harold Woodell's All the King's Men: The Search for a
Usable Past to their Masterworks series. Randolph Runyon's The
Taciturn Text: The Fiction of Robert Penn Warren identifies recurrent
situations in a number of the novels where a son must act on or
interpret a father's legacy and analyzes the significance of these
textual encounters in Freudian terms. Jack Burden is the subject of
Martin Lumpkin's psychoanalytic reading of All the King's Men.
In the final "analysis," Lumpkin finds that Jack's
marriage is motivated by denial of a deep-seated Oedipal entrapment rather than by any true moral development. Both Runyon and Lumpkin
wisely temper the excitement of psychoanalytic readings with the caution
that, as Runyon puts it, "Freud can be a forced fit" for
characters that are carefully crafted by a master storyteller. No less
absorbing is Brian Ragen's study of the automobile as vehicle of
Jack Burden's isolation. In "We Always Have to Go West:
Automobiles, Innocence, and All the King's Men," Ragen
explores the way that the sense of freedom from self and society
provided by the car establishes Jack as a figure in the tradition of
R.W.B. Lewis's American Adam. These and other secondary works
contribute new and insightful ways to read Warren's fiction, and
the critical heritage is richer for the effort.
As might be expected, many of the recent critical studies take a
longer view of Warren's work. Freedman's study of All the
King's Men differs from those already noted by focusing on the
transitional nature of the novel, both in terms of Warren's
developing racial views and of America's Civil Rights
transformation. But more and more, these studies look specifically at
the longer view of Warren's development as a poet. In "Young
Warren and the Problematics of Faith," Bedford Clark looks back to
the rarely anthologized Fugitive period poems to learn about "the
formative imagination" of Warren's early years and thereby
identifies a basis for tracking Warren's imaginative development
throughout. his career. Nathan Scott provides in "Warren's
Career in Poetry" a comprehensive and well-developed survey of
Warren's poetry and highlights Brother to Dragons as the
transitional work between his consciously modernist poems and the
development of his own voice as a gifted verse storyteller. Charlotte
Beck opens "The Postmodernism of Robert Penn Warren" with a
similar overview of the two major periods in Warren's poetry and
goes on to a full discussion of Brother to Dragons as a bridge into the
postmodern form. Beck places Warren squarely in the middle generation
between the modernists and the postmodernists, and shows how his fiction
and criticism sparked formal experimentation in his poetry. In dealing
with the long poems, both Beck and Finley give careful attention to
Warren's process of revision, the shaping of his poems and verse
passages, and their placement in the context of larger sequences.
Perkins takes the same approach with his analysis of the fiction,
drawing (as does Beck) on the major Warren deposits, a trend much
welcomed and long overdue.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of recent poetry criticism is the
attention given to the later volumes of poetry. In 1977, Warren observed
in an interview with Peter Stitt that "more and more for me the
germ of a poem is an event in the natural world." As Nathan Scott
convincingly argues in his long survey of Warren's poetry, this is
certainly the case in Being Here (1980) and in the final great period of
creativity that produced Rumor Verified (1981), Chief Joseph (1983), and
the Altitudes and Extensions volume contained in New and Selected Poems
1923-1985. Floyd Watkins notes in "'The Body of This
Death' in Robert Penn Warren's Later Poems" that the
details of early life disappear from the later poetry as Warren journeys
to natural places of meditation. In her analysis of the Warren personae
in the late poems, Frances Bixler concludes that the new voices
"reflect the aging poet's hunger for knowledge, not of
history, but of the dark, mysterious realm just beyond human
cognition." On a larger scale, Randolph Runyon brings his
psychoanalytical approach to the personae of the late poems with his
book-length study The Braided Dream.
In "The Nobel Prize Deferred Again," Patrick Samway
observes that Warren's elevation to America's first Poet
Laureateship tops an incredible history of national recognition, a
record all the more remarkable because of his long-standing commitment
to scholarship and teaching. The implication is that his scholarly
standards and his considerable popularity will insure that he will
remain an important writer for a wide range of American readers. Leslie
Fiedler argues to the same conclusion in "Robert Penn Warren: A
Final Word," but from another quarter, maintaining that
Warren's staying power will not be due to the modernist or
postmodernist aspects of his poetry and fiction, but rather to
"their innate mythopoeic power that appeals to both elite and
ordinary readers." For Fiedler, and for many critics regardless of
theoretical orientation, Warren's work continues to live even
though the poet's voice has gone silent.
But if the primary publishing record trails off, it leads to the
"vibrant silence" encountered in the opening lines of
"Waiting." From a bibliographer's perspective, that
silence will resonate as long as scholars continue to assess
Warren's place in our time. Warren himself seems to have initiated
that assessment during his eightieth-birthday interview, when he went on
to refashion St. Augustine's definition of man's relationship
to time in this way:
The question of how man lives in time: he's constantly aware of
it, or should be. . . . He's trying to find a place in time. And I
don't think it's morbid at all - it's only natural
You're in a flow, and it's only natural to swim, if you can.
(Vitale, "Conversation," p. 5)
Although Warren once observed that the effort of framing the right
question can be more rewarding than the answer, the truth of this answer
is confirmed by many voices. The critical heritage shows just how well
he swam - in his pondy woods, in his art, and in the life of his nation.
CHECKLIST OF CRITICISM, 1986-1993
BOOKS
Bloom, Harold, ed. Robert Penn Warren. New York: Chelsea, 1986.
Includes the following previously published materials: W. M. Frohock,
"Mr. Warren's Albatross"; Cleanth Brooks, "R.P.
Warren: Experience Redeemed in Knowledge"; Joseph Frank,
"Romanticism and Reality in Robert Penn Warren"; Jonathan
Baumbach, "The Metaphysics of Demagoguery: All the King's
Men"; Arthur Mizener, "Robert Penn Warren: All the King's
Men"; Walter Sullivan, "The Historical Novelist and the
Existential Peril: Robert Penn Warren's Band of Angels"; Allen
Shepherd, "The Poles of Fiction: Warren's At Heaven's
Gate"; Daniel Aaron, "The Meditations of Robert Penn
Warren"; Richard Howard, "Dreadful Alternatives: A Note on
Robert Penn Warren"; Richard Law, "Warren's Night Rider
and the Issue of Naturalism: The 'Nightmare' of Our Age";
Harold Bloom, "Brother to Dragons"; David Wyatt, "The
Critic as Artist"; T. R. Hummer, "Audubon and the Moral
Center"; Calvin Bedient," "Truth's
Glare-Glory'"; Harold Bloom, "Sunset Hawk: Warren's
Poetry and Tradition"; Paul Mariani, "Robert Penn
Warren." John Burt's "The Self-Subversion of Value in
Warren's World Enough and Time" is here first published.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical interpretations: Robert Penn
Warren's "All the King's Men." New York: Chelsea,
1987. Includes the following previously published materials: Charles
Kaplan, "Jack Burden: Modern Ishmael"; Jonathan Baumbach,
"The Metaphysics of Demagoguery: All the King's Men";
Arthur Mizener, "Robert Penn Warren: All the King's Men";
Allen Shepherd, "Robert Penn Warren as a Philosophical
Novelist"; Murray Krieger, "The Assumption of the
'Burden' of History in All the King's Men"; Richard
Gray, "The American Novelist and American History: A Revaluation of
All the King's Men"; Simone Vauthier, "The Case of the
Vanishing Narratee: An Inquiry into All the King's Men";
Richard G. Law," 'The Case of the Upright Judge': The
Nature of Truth in All the King's Men"; Richard H. King,
"From Politics to Psychology: Warren's All the King's
Men."
Bun, John, Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism. New Haven,
Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1988.
Clark, William Bedford. The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren.
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991.
Grimshaw, James A., Jr., ed. Time's Glory: Original Essays on
Robert Penn Warren. Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1986.
Millichap, Joseph R. Robert Penn Warren: A Study of the Short
Fiction. Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction 39. New York: Twayne,
1992.
Runyon, Randolph Paul. The Braided Dream: Robert Penn Warren's
Late Poetry. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990.
Runyon, Randolph Paul. The Taciturn Text: Robert Penn Warren's
Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
Ruppersburg, Hugh. Robert Penn Warren and the American Imagination.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.
Watkins, Floyd C., John T. Hiers, and Mary Louise Weaks, eds. Talking
with Robert Penn Warren. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.
Weeks, Dennis L., ed. "To Love So Well The World": A
Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. New York: Peter Lang, 1992.
Woodell, Harold. "All the King's Men": The Search for
a Usable Past. Twayne's Masterwork Studies No. 112. Boston: G. K.
Hall, 1993.
PARTIAL BOOKS
Titles listed here include books by a single author with sections on
Warren, and essay collections by a single author with essays (new and
previously published or presented) on Warren.
Clausen, Christopher. "Explorations of America." In The
Moral Imagination: Essays on Literature and Ethics. Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1986. Includes a discussion of Warren's
Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. pp. 154-176.
Conkin, Paul K. The Southern Agrarians. Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1988.
Douglas, Paul. Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1986.
Ehrenpreis, Irvin, and Daniel Albright, eds. Poetries of America:
Essays on the Relation of Character to Style. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1989, pp. 99-106, 107-117.
Heilman, Robert B. The Southern Connection: Essays, Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1991, pp, 65-80. Includes "Robert
Penn Warren at LSU: Reminiscences," a paper delivered at
Warren's Seventy-fifth Birthday Symposium (1980), and two
previously published essays.
Hobson, Fred. The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1991.
Inge, M. Thomas. Faulkner, Sut, and Other Southerners: Essays in
Literary History. Locust Hills Literary Studies No. 2. West Cornwall
Connecticut: Locust Hill, 1992.
Lewis, R. W. B. Literary Reflections: A Shoring of Images. Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1998. Includes a section on "Robert
Penn Warren's Canon of Precursors," pp. 259-291.
Makowsky, Veronica A. Caroline Gordon: A Biography. New York: Oxford,
1989. Unverified.
Montague, J. The Figure in the Cave and Other Essays. New York:
Syracuse University Press, 1989. Includes "American Pegasus,"
pp. 188-199.
Nelson, R. A. Aesthetic Frontiers: The Machiavellian Tradition and
the Southern Imagination. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
1990. Chapter 6 is entitled "A Romantic Elegy for Republican
Virtue: Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and the Machiavellian
Cycle," pp. 197-232.
Nielson, Alden Lynn. Reading Rate: White American Poets and Racial
Discourse in the Twentieth Century. Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1988.
Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After.
Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987.
Ragen, Brian Abel. A Wreck on the Road to Damascus. New Orleans:
Loyola University Press, 1980. Chapter 2, "The Automobile and the
American Adam." Includes a section later revised for his 1992
festschrift essay "We Have Always Gone West: Automobiles,
Innocence, and All the King's Men," pp. 92-05.
Rubin, Louis D. The Mockingbird in the Gum Tree: A Literary
Gallimaufry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991.
Reprints "R. P. W., 1905-1980," pp. 137-148.
Scott, Nathan A. Visions of presence in Modern American Poetry.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Spears, Monroe K. American Ambitions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1987. Includes "Robert Penn Warren as Hardy
American," pp. 87-106; "Robert Penn Warren as Critic,"
pp. 167-178.
Strout, Cushing. Making American Tradition: Visions and Revisions
from Ben Franklin to Alice Walker. New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1990. Includes a section on William James and All the King's
Men, "Gentle William and Warren's Willie," pp. 88-99.
Sullivan, Walter. In Praise of Blood Sports and Other Essays. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.
Winchell, Mark Royden, ed. The Vanderbilt Tradition: Essays in Honor
of Thomas Daniel Young. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1991.
Woodward, C. Vann. The Future of the Past. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989. Includes "History in Robert Penn
Warren's Fiction," a previously unpublished paper delivered in
1987 at Yale University's conference on Robert Penn Warren.
Young, Thomas Daniel. Selected Essays: 1965-1985. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1991. Includes a section on
"Brother to Dragons: A Meditation on the Basic Nature of Man,"
pp. 142-152.
ESSAYS
Titles in this section include articles individually published in
newspapers, popular and scholarly periodicals, or collected in
multiple-author anthologies.
Anon. "Harvard Gets Roosevelt, Yale Gets Robert Penn
Warren." Wilson Library Bulletin, 61 (September 1986), 7-8.
Anon. "Write-on!: Eighty-year-old Robert Penn Warren is Named
America's First Poet Laureate." People Weekly, 25 (17 March
1986), 66.
Allums, J. Larry. "Robert Penn Warren's Fugitive Years: A
Revaluation." Southern Quarterly, 31.4 (Summer 1993), 75-85.
Bartsch, Friedman K. "Brother to Dragons: The Burden of
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Bloom, Harold, and David Bromwich, Introduction. Contemporary Poets.
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Hopkins' Imaginative Realism." Renascence, 42.1-2 (Fall-Winter
1992), 51-64.
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States." Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1986. Ed. J. M.
Brook. Detroit: Gale, 1987, pp. 30-38.
Bronich, M. K. "Traditsii 'iuzhnoi shkoly' i roman R.
P. Uorrena 'Pribezhishche': K voprosu o kontseptsii mira v
tvorchestve Uorrena." Mezhliteraturnye sviazi i problema realizma.
Ed. M. K. Bronich. Gorki: Gor'kovskii gosuniv, 1988, pp. 35-45.
Brooks, Cleanth. Afterward. Southern Quarterly, 31.4 (Summer 1993),
106-112.
Brooks, Cleanth. Foreword. Robert Penn Warren/Cleanth Brooks: Friends
of Their Youth. Ed. James A. Grimshaw, Jr. Lexington, Kentucky: King
Library Press, 1993.
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So Well the World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren.
Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 13-18.
Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. "The Origin of The
Southern Review." Southern Review, 22 (January 1986), 214-217. Rpt.
in "The Southern Review" and Modern Literature. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1988, pp. 34-37.
Bukovskaia, M. V. "O khudozhestvenno-simvolicheskoi funktsii
zaglavia i epigrafa v romane R. P. Uorrena 'Vsia korolevskaia
rat'." Sistemnyi Analiz Khudozhestvennogo Teksta. Ed, R. A.
Kiselva. Vologda: Vologodskii Gosudarstvennyi Pedagogicheski Insti, pp.
25-32.
Burneko, Grace Bailey. "Innocence Recaptured: In
'Composition in Gold and Red-Gold'." Southern Quarterly,
31.4 (Summer 1993), 95-100.
Burt, John. "The Self-Subversion of Value in Warren's World
Enough and Time." In Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Harold Bloom. New
York: Chelsea, 1986. Revised and included in Burt's Robert Penn
Warren and American Idealism.
Casper, Leonard: "Toward the Great Amen: Warren's Later
Novels." In Time's Glory: Original Essays on Robert Penn
Warren. Ed. James A. Grimshaw, Jr. Conway: University of Central
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Chaplin, Jeanette. "Burning Barns in Warren and Faulkner."
In "To Love So Well the World": A Festschrift in Honor of
Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp.
223-228.
Chistonogova, L. K. "K probleme khudozhestvennogo vremeni: Na
Analiz khudozhestvennogo teksta." Sistemnyi Analiz
Khudozhestvennogo Teksta. Ed. R. A. Kiselva. Vologda: Vologodskii
Gosudarstvennyi Pedagogicheski Insti, pp. 106-115.
Clark, William Bedford. "Robert Penn Warrens Love Affair With
America." Southern Review, 22.4 (Autumn 1986), 667-679.
Clark, William Bedford. "'Secret Sharers' in
Warren's Later Fiction." In Time's Glory: Original Essays
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Central Arkansas Press, 1986, pp. 65-76.
Clark, William Bedford. "Whitman, Warren, and the Literature of
Discovery." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 10.1 (Summer 1992),
10-15.
Clark, William Bedford. "Young Warren and the Problematics of
Faith." Mississippi Quarterly, 45.1 (Winter 1991-92), 29-39.
Clinton, Mark S. "'The House of Poetry': A Reading of
'Night Flight'." In "To Love So Well the
World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L.
Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 229-238.
Core, George. "Foreword." Night Rider. By Robert Penn
Warren. Southern Classics Series. Nashville, Tennessee: J. S. Sanders,
1992, pp. ix-xiv.
Core, George. "Life's Bright Parenthesis: Warren's
Example and One Man's Pathology." In Home Ground: Southern
Autobiography. Ed. J. Bill Berry. Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1991, pp. 48-60.
Core, George. "Lives Fugitive and Unwritten." In Located
Lives: Place and Idea in Southern Autobiography. Ed. J. Bill Berry.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990, pp. 52-65.
Core, George. "Vanderbilt English and the Rise of New
Criticism." In The Vanderbilt Tradition. Ed. Mark Royden Winchell.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991, pp. 19-35.
Cunningham, Cheryl A. "Splitting the Dark: Henri Bergson and All
the King's Men." In "To Love So Well the World": A
Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New
York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 239-250.
Cunningham, Henry. "Jack Burden Investigates." Southern
Quarterly, 31.1 (Fall 1992), 35-49.
Davis, Robert Murray. "The Whole World ... Willie Stark: Novel
and Film of All the King's Men." In Film and Literature: A
Comparative Approach to Adaptation. Ed. Michael Schoenecke. Lubbock:
Texas Tech University Press, 1988, pp. 33-44.
Davydov, Iu. "Literatura i Demokratia." Voprosy Literatury,
K-9 (1988). Moscow, Russia: 2, 116-149.
Dietrich, Brian. "Original Sin or Original Myth?: The Philosophy
of Evolution in the Original Brother to Dragons." In "To Love
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Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 251-258.
Dietrich, Brian. "Christ or Antichrist: Understanding Eight
Words in 'Blackberry Winter'." Studies in Short Fiction,
29.2 (Spring 1992), 215-220.
Erskine, Albert. Editor's Note. A Robert Penn Warren Reader. Ed.
Albert Erskine. New York: Random, 1989, pp. xi-xiv.
Feldman, Robert. "Responsibility in Crisis: Jack Burden's
Struggle in All the King's Men." In "To Love So Well the
World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L.
Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 101-112.
Ferriss, Lucy. "From Manly to Cassie: The Evolution of
Warren's Female Persona." In "To Love So Well the
World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L.
Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 259-272.
Fiedler, Leslie. "Robert Penn Warren: A Final Word." South
Carolina Review, 23. 1 (Fall 1990), 9-16. Rpt. in "To Love So Well
the World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed.
Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 19-28.
Finley, William. "Warren's 'Grotesque' Nightmare:
'Ballad of a Sweet Dream of Peace'." In "To Love So
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Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 171-188.
Freedman, Carl. "Power, Sexuality, and Race in All the
King's Men." In Southern Literature and Literary Theory. Ed.
Jefferson Humphries. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990, pp.
127-141.
Fridy, Will. "The Author and the Ball Player: An Imprint of
Memory in the Writings of Robert Penn Warren." Mississippi
Quarterly, 44.2 (Spring 1991), 159-166.
Fridy, Will. "Peering into the Pure Imagination: Robert. Penn
Warren's The Circus in the Attic." Mississippi Quarterly, 45.1
(Winter 1991-92), 69-75.
Gowda, H. H. Anniah. "America's Poet Laureate."
Literary Half-Yearly, 28.1 (January 1987), 40-51.
Gray, Paul. "All the Nation's Poets: Robert Penn Warren,
Already Much Laureled, Takes on a New Title. Time, March 10, 1986, p.
48.
Grigsby, John L. "The Poisonous Snake in the Garden."
Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association (POMPA) 1988,
pp. 46-50.
Grimshaw, James A., Jr. "Shakespeare's Henriad and All the
King's Men: A Study in Parallels." In "To Love So Well
the World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed.
Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 45-57.
Grimshaw, James A., Jr. Preface. Time's Glory: Original Essays
on Robert Penn Warren. Ed, James A. Grimshaw, Jr. Conway: University of
Central Arkansas Press, 1986, pp. 109-118.
Grimshaw, James A., Jr. "Biographical Trends in Warren
Criticism: the 1980s." Southern Quarterly, 31.4 (Summer 1993),
51-67.
Grimshaw, James A., Jr. "Biographical Note." In Time's
Glory: Original Essays on Robert Penn Warren. Ed. James A. Grimshaw, Jr.
Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1986, pp. 119-124.
Hays, Tony A. "The Two Fathers of Percy Munn: Father-Son
Relationships in Night Rider." In "To Love So Well the
World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L.
Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 273-279.
Hendrik, George and Willene. Introduction. Katherine Anne Porter.
Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Unverified.
Holden, Jonathan. "Contemporary Verse Storytelling."
Southern Review, 27.2 (April 1991), 376-398.
Hollander, John. "Modes and Ranges of a Long Dawn." In
Contemporary Poets. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1986, pp. 9-17.
Hoogestraat, Jane. "A Place to Come To and the Problem of
History." In "To Love So Welt the World": A Festschrift
in Honor of Robert Penn Warren, Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter
Lang, 1992, pp. 59-74.
Inge, M. Thomas. "The Fugitives and the Agrarians: A
Clarification." American Literature, 62.3 (September 1990), 486.
Jackson, Richard. "The Generous Time: Robert Penn Warren and the
Phenomenology of the Moment." In The Dismantling Of Time in
Contemporary Poetry, pp. 23-64. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
1988.
Jancovic, Mark. "Robert Penn Warren as New Critic: Against
Propaganda and Irresponsibility." Southern Literary Journal, 24.1
(Fall 1991), 53-65.
Justus, James H. "The Power of Filiation in All the King's
Men." In Modern American Fiction: Form and Function. Ed. Thomas
Daniel Young. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989, pp.
156-169.
Justus, James H. "Warren and the Narrator as Historical
Self." In Time's Glory: Original Essays on Robert Penn Warren,
Ed. James A. Grimshaw, Jr. Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press,
1986, pp. 109-118.
Justus, James H. "Wisdom on the Slant: Warren over the Long
Haul." Southern Quarterly, 31.4 (Summer 1993), 37-50.
Law, Richard G. "Warren's World Enough and Time: 'El
in Arcadia Ergo'." In Time's Glory: Original Essays on
Robert Penn Warren. Ed. James A. Grimshaw, Jr. Conway: University of
Central Arkansas Press, 1986, pp. 13-43.
Lederer, Katherine G. Introduction. "To Love So Well the
World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L.
Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. xix-xxii.
Lehman, David. "The Poet of the People: R. P. Warren."
Newsweek, 107 (10 March 1986), 77.
Lewis, R. W. B. "The Great Dragon Country of Robert Penn
Warren." Southern Quarterly, 31.4 (Summer 1993), 13-36.
Long, Robert Sterling. "Warren Mounts His Horse: Flood's
Author as Southern Gothic/Grotesque Writer." In "To Love So
Well the World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed.
Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 279-286.
Lowell, Robert. "Robert Penn Warren's Brother to
Dragons." In Collected Prose. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux,
1987.
Lumpkin, Martin. "Jack's Unconscious Burden: A
Psychoanalytic Interpretation of All the King's Men." In
"To Love So Well the World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert
Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp.
196-210.
Magaw, Malcolm O. 'Pilgrimage to Ambivalence: A Reinterpretation of Robert Penn Warren's A Place to Come To." Midwest
Quarterly, 29.4 (Summer 1988), 469-486.
Marcote, Paul J. "What the 'Ontological Critic' in the
Authors of Understanding Poetry Adds to the 'New Criticism' of
Brooks and Warren: Essays in Honor of Harry T. Moore." In The
Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon. Ed. Lawrence B. Gamache.
Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987, pp. 46-60.
Mariani, P. L. "Robert Penn Warren." In A Usable Past. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1987, pp. 153-170. Unverified.
Marty, Martin E. "Laureate." Christian Century, 103 (19-26
March 1986), 311.
McDowell, Frederick P. W. Foreword. Southern Quarterly, 31.4 (Summer
1993), 7-8.
Mellard, James M. "Lists, Stories, and Granny's Quilt:
Writing - and Rewriting - Southern Cultural Literary History."
Mississippi Quarterly, 43.4 (Fall 1991), 463-480.
Miller, Mark Daniel. 'Knowledge and the Image of 'Billie
Potts': A Reading Via a Reading of Strandberg's Reading."
In "To Love So Well the World": A Festschrift in Honor of
Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp.
123-148.
Millichap, Joseph R. "All the King's Men, Photography and
Filmy In "To Love So Welt the World": A Festschrift in Honor
of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992,
pp. 149-158.
Moore, Sherry E. "All That Glitters: Golden Imagery in Selected
Poetry and 'The Circus in the Attic'." In "To Love
So Well the World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren.
Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 287-294.
Mukherjee, Bharati. "Immigrant Writing: Give Us Your
Maximalists!" New York Times Book Review, 28 August 1988, pp. l,
28-29.
Nelson, Dale. "Laureate's First Hour." Wilson Library
Bulletin, 61 (December 1986), 31.
Nelson, Dale. "Poet Laureate's Activities." Wilson
Library Bulletin, 61 (February 1987), 29.
Olney, James. "Parents and Children in Robert Penn Warren's
Autobiography." In Home Ground: Southern Autobiography. Ed. J. Bill
Berry. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991, pp. 31-47.
Pagliasotti, Mary Anne. "Idealism and Pragmatism in
Warren." In "To Love So Well the World": A Festschrift in
Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang,
1992, pp. 295-302.
Parini, Jay. "Robert Penn Warren." Horizon, 30 (June 1987),
36-37.
Payton, Lana K. "'Out of the Strong Shall Come Forth
Sweetness': Women in All the King's Men." In "To
Love So Well the World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn
Warren. Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 303-312.
Perkins, James A. "The Myth of the Labyrinth in World Enough and
Time." In "To Love So Well the World".' A
Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New
York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 159-170.
Peterman, Gina D. "Warren's 'Summer Storm (circa
1916),' and 'God's Grace'," Explicator, 50.2
(Winter 1992), 112-115.
Porter, Katherine Anne. Letters of Katherine Anne Porter. Ed. Isabel
Bayley. New York: Atlantic, 1990.
Ragen, Brian Abel. "'We Always Have to Go West':
Automobiles, Innocence, and All the King's Men." In "To
Love So Well the World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn
Warren. Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 189-196.
Revised for his study of Flannery O'Connor, A Wreck on the Road to
Damascus, 1989. (See "Partial Books" section.)
Raper, Porter G. "Southern Identity and Myth in 'Pondy
Woods'." Southern Quarterly, 30.1 (Fall 1991), 19-23.
Raper, Julius Rowan. Inventing Modern Southern Fiction: A Postmodern
View." Southern Literary Journal, 22.2 (Spring 1990), 3-18.
Runyon, Randolph Paul. "Willie's Wink and Other Doubtful
Paternal Texts in the Novels of Robert Penn Warren." In Southern
Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Jefferson Humphries. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1990, pp. 270-283.
Runyon, Randolph Paul. "Father, Son, and Taciturn Text." In
"To Love So Well the World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert
Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp.
113-122.
Runyon, Randolph Paul. "The Fictive Fetus in The Cave." In
Time's Glory: Original Essays in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed.
James A. Grimshaw, Jr. Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press,
1986, pp. 45-64.
Ruppersburg, Hugh. "Discovering America's History: Robert
Penn Warren's Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce." South Central
Review, 5.1 (Spring 1988), 75-86.
Ruppersburg, Hugh. "Robert Penn Warren and the 'Burden of
Our Time': Segregation and Who Speaks for the Negro?"
Mississippi Quarterly, 42.2 (Spring 1989), 115-128.
Ryan, Steven T. "World Enough and Time. A Refutation of
Poe's History as Tragedy." Southern Quarterly, 31.4 (Summer
1993), 86-94.
Safire, William. "Unwordability" (in his "On
Language" Column). New York Times Magazine, October 22, 1989, p.
16.
Samway, Patrick H. "The Nobel Prize Deferred Again (R. P.
Warren)." America, 157 (14 November 1987), 359+.
Sanoff, Alvin P. "A Conversation With America's First Poet
Laureate." Foreign Literatures, Beijing, China, 3 (1987), 86-88.
Sanoff, Alvin P. "Pretty, Hell! Poetry Is Life'." U.S.
News and World Report, 100 (June 23, 1986), 73.
Scott, Nathan A., Jr. "Warren's Career in Poetry: Taking
Council of the Heart Alone." Centennial Review, 25.2 (Spring 1989),
514-519.
Simpson, Lewis P. "Robert Penn Warren: The Loneliness
Artist." Sewanee Review, 99.3 (Summer 1991), 337-361.
Slotkin, Alan R. "The Language of Social Interactions: The
Idiolect of Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren's All the
King's Men." College Language Association Journal, 30.3 (March
1987), 294-306.
Spears, Monroe K. "The Critics Who Made Us: Robert Penn
Warren." Sewanee Review, 94.1 (Winter 1986), 99-111.
Spears, Monroe K. "Robert Penn Warren and the Literary
Life." Gettysburg Review, 3.1 (Winter 1990), 203-206.
Strandberg, Victor. "Poet of Youth: Robert Penn Warren at
Eighty." In Time's Glory: Original Essays on Robert Penn
Warren. Ed. James A. Grimshaw, Jr. Conway: University of Central
Arkansas Press, 1986, pp. 91-106.
Strandberg, Victor. "R. P. W. and T. S. E.: In the Steps of the
(Post)Modern Master." In "To Love So Well the World": A
Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New
York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 29-44.
Strandberg, Victor. "Robert Penn Warren and the Search for
Design." Gettysburg Review (Summer 1992), 480-497.
Strandberg, Victor. "Robert Penn Warren's Worst Book."
Paper presented at the symposium "Robert Penn Warren: A Hometown
Symposium," October 1987, Austin Peay State University,
Clarksville, Tennessee. Quoted in Runyon's The Braided Dream.
Unrue, Darlene Harbour. "Katherine Anne Porter and The Southern
Review." In "To Love So Well the World": A Festschrift in
Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang,
1992, pp. 75-84.
Vitale, Tom. "A Conversation with Robert Penn Warren."
Ontario Review, 25 (Fall-Winter 1986-87), 5-13.
Waage, Frederick O. "Warren's New Dawn." Southern
Quarterly, 31.4 (Summer 1993), 101-105.
Waldrep, Christopher. "William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and
the Law." Southern Studies, 2.1 (Spring 1991), 39-50.
Watkins, Floyd C. "'The Body of This Death' in Robert
Penn Warren's Later Poems." Kenyon Review, 10.4 (Fall 1988),
31-41.
Weeks, Dennis L. "Preface." In "To Love So Well the
World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L.
Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. xv-xvii.
Wilcox, Earl J. "Who Speaks for Mr. Warren on the Negro? A Mock
Interview." In The Vanderbilt Tradition: Essays in Honor of Thomas
Daniel Young. Ed. Mark Royden Winchell. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1991, pp. 105-116.
Wilson, R. Journal of Southern History. 54 259 1988. Unverified.
Winchell, Mark Royden. "Robert Penn Warren's Brother to
Dragons: Irony and the Image of Man." In The Vanderbilt Tradition:
Essays in Honor of Thomas Daniel Young. Ed. Mark Royden Winchell. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991, pp. 105-130.
Winn, Thomas A. "The Night Rider Revisited: A Historical
Perspective." Southern Quarterly, 31.4 (Summer 1993), 68-74.
Woodward, C. Vann. "Foreword." John Brown: The Making of a
Martyr. By Robert Penn Warren. Southern Classics Series. Nashville,
Tennessee: J. S. Sanders, 1993, pp. xi-xvii.
Wooley, Lillian Nobles. "The Medieval Interlace Structure in All
the King's Men." In "To Love So Well the World": A
Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Dennis L. Weeks. New
York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 313-326.
Zimmerman, Lee. "An Eye for an I: Emerson and Some
'True' Poems of Robinson Jeffers, William Everson, Robert Penn
Warren, and Adrienne Rich." Contemporary Literature, 53.4 (Winter
1992), 645-664.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES
Finley, William K. The Robert Penn Warren Papers (YCAL MSS 51). New
Haven: Yale, 1991.
Grimshaw, James A., Jr. "Bibliographical Note." In
Time's Glory: Original Essays on Robert Penn Warren, Conway:
University of Central Arkansas Press, 1986, pp. 119-124.
Grimshaw, James A., Jr. "Biographical Trends in Warren
Criticism: The 1980's." Southern Quarterly, 31.4 (Summer
1995), 51-67.
Hendricks, Donovan, and William J. Burling. "Robert Penn Warren:
A Selective, Chronological Bibliography." In "To Love So Welt
the World": A Festschrift in Honor of Robert Penn Warren. Ed.
Dennis L. Weeks. New York: Peter Lang, 1992, pp. 1-11.
Monholland, C. S. "Southern History in Periodicals, 1987: A
Selected Bibliography." Journal of Southern History, 54.2 (May
1988), 259-297. Unverified.
DISSERTATIONS
Barry, Michael Gordon. "Recovering Meaning from the Irony of
History: American Political Fiction in Transition: DAI 50.12 (June
1990): 3949A. University of New York, Buffalo.
Blair, John M. "The Southern Cultural Tradition in the Works of
Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Walker Percy." DAI 50.11 (May
1990): 3585A. Tulane University.
Hendricks, Randy Joe. "Companion to Owls: Robert Penn Warren and
the Literature of Knowledge." DAI 52.3 (1991): DA9121723.
University of Tennessee.
Houck, Donna Havnaer. "The Prison of the Self: Images of
Entrapment, Retreat, and Release in the Novels of Robert Penn
Warren." DAI 48.5 (November 1987): 1203A. University of North
Carolina, Greensboro.
Leatherbarrow, Ronald. "The Dynamics of Self-Fulfillment: A
Study of the Early Fiction of Robert Penn Warren." DAI 47.3
(September 1986): 901A.
Ledbetter, Tony Mark. "Narrative Virtue: A Study of Character in
the Works of James Agee, Walker Percy, and Robert Penn Warren." DAI
49.1 (July 1988): 89A. Emory University.
Miller, Mark Daniel. "Robert Penn Warren's Early Poetry,
1922-1953: An Appreciation." DAI 47.2 (August 1986): 530A-531A.
Weaks, Mary Louise. "A 'Little Postage Stamp of Native
Soil' in the Upper South: The Poetry and Fiction of Caroline
Gordon, Allen Tare, and Robert Penn Warren." DAI 50.2 (August
1989): 446A.
Wilson, Deborah. "Patterning the Past: History as Ideology in
Modern Southern Fiction." DAI 52.9 (1992): DA9207538. Louisiana
State University, Baton Rouge.
REVIEWS
Primary Works
Bode, Ken. "Hero or Demagogue? The Two Faces of Huey Long on
Film." New Republic, 194 (March 3, 1986), 37-41. Review of Ken
Burns's 1986 film Huey Long quotes two passages by Warren from the
film.
Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr., 'Essays Display Art of Robert Penn
Warren." Atlanta Journal Constitution. May 28, 1989, N9. Review of
New and Selected Essays.
Brustein, Robert. "Robert Brustein on Theater: A Tribute to
Robert Penn Warren." New Republic, May 25, 1987, pp. 25-27. Review
of Adrian Hall's Trinity Repertory Company production of All the
King's Men (Providence, Rhode Island, 1987).
Cox, Carole. "Literature on Film and Film on Literature."
English Journal, 75 (October 1986), 87. Review of the film Herman
Melville: Damned in Paradise (Pyramid, 90 min., 1986), which includes
critical commentary spoken by Warren.
Craft, Robert. "At Play in the Fields of the Mind."
Washington Post Book World, April 30, 1989, p. 5. Review of New and
Selected Essays.
Crowder, Ashby Bland. "Robert Penn Warren: The Once and Future
Critic." Mississippi Quarterly, 43 (Spring 1990), 241-247. Review
of New and Selected Essays.
Disch, Thomas M. "All the King's Men." Nation,
December 12, 1987, p. 725. Review of the Arena Stage Production of
Warren's stage version in Washington, D.C.
Dingus, Anne. "Remember the Alamo!" Texas Monthly, 18
(January 1990), 132. Unverified.
Feeney, Mark. "The Message of Mr. Warren's
Profession." Boston Globe, April 16, 1989, B51. Review of New and
Selected Essays.
Hiett, John, "Writers of Today." Library Journal, 116
(September 1991), 242. Video recording review of Writers of Today, 5
vols (New York: First Run/Icarus, 1991; Vol 2: Robert Penn Warren, b/w,
30 min. commercial release of the Walter Kerr interview).
Lochte, Dick. "Hope of the Heart" (Mark Taper Forum theater
reviews). Los Angeles, 35 (November 1990), 229. Review of Warren's
stage version of All the King's Men. Unverified.
Nash, Charles C. "Portrait of a Father." Library Journal,
113 (October 1988), 84.
Quinlan, Kieran. [Review of Portrait of a Father, Time's Glory:
Original Essays on Robert Penn Warren, and Robert Penn Warren and
American Idealism.! Mississippi Quarterly, 94 (Fall 1991), 483-480.
Rogers, Michael. [Review of the Southern Classics Series edition of
Night Rider!. Library Journal, 117 (December 1992), 192.
Ray, Donald. "New and Selected Essays." Library Journal,
114 (March 1989), 72.
Siegel, Roslyn. "New and Selected Essays." New York Times
Book Review, May 2, 1989, Sec. 7, 19.
Stuttaford, Genevieve. "New and Selected Essays."
Publishers Weekly, January 27, 1989. p. 461.
Turner, Robert L. "A Long Life for All the King's Men.
Boston Globe, September 19, 1989, p. 19. A retrospective review of All
the King's Men.
Secondary Works
Beck, Charlotte H. [Review of The Taciturn Text: The Fiction of
Robert Penn Warren, by Randolph Runyon!. South Atlantic Review, 58
(January 1993), 162-165.
Brooks, Cleanth. "Robert Penn Warren and American
Idealism." Sewanee Review, 97 (Fall 1989), 586-591. Review essay of
Burt's Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism. Includes a brief
memorial paragraph on Warren.
Clark, William Bedford. "A Warrenesque Criticism." Southern
Review, 25 (Spring 1989), 514-519. Review essay of John Burt's
Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism.
Kerley, Gary. "Book Shelf: Robert Penn Warren and the American
Imagination." Atlanta Journal Constitution, September 9, 1990, N8.
Review of Hugh Ruppersburg's Robert Penn Warren and the American
Imagination.
REMINISCENCES AND MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
Anon. "A Poet's Life, Gloriously Spent." Chicago
Tribune, September 17, 1989, Sec. 4, 2.
Anon. "Robert Penn Warren, Poet and Author, Dies." New York
Times, September 16, 1989, pp 1, 11.
Anon. "Robert Penn Warren, RIP." National Review, October
13, 1989, p. 21.
Anon. "Robert Penn Warren, Writer, Poet, Winner of 3 Pulitzer
Prizes; at 84." Boston Globe, September 16, 1989, p. 28.
Anon. "Southern Culture's Leading Man of Letters."
Atlanta Constitution, September 19, 1989, p. A10.
Barnes, Bart. "Author Poet: Robert Penn Warren Dies."
Washington Post, September 16, 1989, pp. A1, A14.
Beiswenger, Eleanor, et al., eds. The Great Dragon Country of Robert
Penn Warren. Special Issue, Southern Quarterly, 31 (Summer 1993), 173
pp.
Bennett, Tom, and Don O'Briant. "His Poetry, Novels Rank
Warren Among the South's Finest Writers." Atlanta Journal
Constitution, September 16, 1989, p. A3.
Brooks, Cleanth. "A Tribute to Robert Penn Warren."
Southern Review, 26 (Winter 1990), p. 2-4.
Clemons, Walter. "Of the Old Man ... Homeward Gazed."
Newsweek, September 25, 1989, p. 67.
D'Evelyn, Thomas. "Robert Penn Warren: An
Appreciation." Christian Science Monitor, October 5, 1989, p. 13.
Davison, Peter. "The Black Aspen." Poem, Sewanee Review, 99
(Summer 1991), 362-363.
Drake, Robert. "Robert Penn Warren's Enormous Spider
Web." Christian Century, 106 (November 22, 1989), 1089-1091.
Dunning, Jennifer. "Admirers Honor the Spirit of Robert Penn
Warren." New York Times, November 15, 1989, pp. 11, 28.
Feeney, Mark. "The Nation's Man of Letters." Boston
Globe, September 16, 1989, p. 1.
Greenberg, Paul. "A Great Work That Is Almost Enough."
Washington Times, September 26, 1989, p. F3.
Grimshaw, James A., Jr. "Robert Penn Warren: A
Reminiscence." Gettysburg Review, 3 (Winter 1990), 207-213.
Hamblin, Robert W. "Robert Penn Warren at the 1965 Southern
Literary Festival: A Personal Recollection." Southern Literary
Journal, 22 (Spring 1990), 53-62.
Harris, Scott. "Robert Penn Warren Dies; Revered for Poems,
Novels." Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1989, p. 11.
Kastor, Elizabeth. "Robert Penn Warren: A Voyage to the
Heart." Washington Post, September 16, 1989, C1, C3.
Kilian, Michael. "Novelist, Poet and Playwright Robert Penn
Warren Dies at 84." Chicago Tribune, September 16, 1989, Sec. 1, p.
8.
Olney, James. "On the Death and Life of Robert Penn
Warren." Southern Review, 26 (Winter 1990), 13-15.
Parini, Jay. "Warren's Genius and Geniality." USA
Today, September 27, 1989, D4.
Pope, John. "'All the King's Men' Author Warren
Dies in His Sleep at 84." Times-Picayune, September 16, 1989, A1.
Rubin, Louis D. "The State of Letters: R.P.W., 1905-1989."
Sewanee Review, 98 (Spring 1990), 236-243.
Sheffer, Thomas A. "Robert Penn Warren: A Twentieth Century
Tale." Poem. Sewanee Review, 98 (Spring 1990), 243-245.
Simpson, Lewis P. "Robert Penn Warren and the South."
Southern Review, 26 (Winter 1990), 7-12.
Stanford, Donald E. "Robert Penn Warren and The Southern
Review." Southern Review, 26 (Winter 1990), 5-6.
Sullivan, Walter. "Robert Penn Warren." Sewanee Review, 97
(Fall 1989), 629-630.
Weatherby, W.J. "A Great Southern Writer." Guardian
(England), September 16, 1989, 21.