Robert Penn Warren

(1905 - 1989)

Born in Guthrie, Kentucky, in 1905, Robert Penn Warren graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1925; received his MA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1927; and took a doctorate from Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar in 1930. He founded and edited The Southern Review in 1935 and emerged as a leading figure of New Criticism. Warren won three Pulitzer Prizes (two for poetry, one for fiction) and was named the first U.S. Poet Laureate in 1986, three years before his death.