As seen on TVThe bicycle is one of mankind's greatest inventions - and the most popular form of transport in history. Robert Penn has ridden one most days of his adult life. In his late 20s, he pedalled 40,000 kilometres around the world. Yet, like cyclists everywhere, the utilitarian bikes he currently owns don't even hint at this devotion. Robert needs a new bike, a bespoke machine that reflects how he feels when he's riding it - like an ordinary man touching the...

Robert Penn cut down an ash tree to see how many things could be made from it. After all, ash is the tree we have made the greatest and most varied use of over the course of human history. Journeying from Wales across Europe and Ireland to the USA, Robert finds that the ancient skills and knowledge of the properties of ash, developed over millennia making wheels and arrows, furniture and baseball bats, are far from dead. The book chronicles how the urge to understand and appreciate trees s...

'Charming, important . . . a journey of discovery' TelegraphOver the course of a year, Robert Penn learns how to plant, harvest, thresh and mill his own wheat, in order to bake bread for his family. In returning to this pre-industrial practice, he tells the fascinating story of our relationship with bread: from the domestication of wheat in the Fertile Crescent at the dawn of civilization, to the rise of mass-produced loaves and the resurgence in homebakin...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE“All the King’s Men, the best American political novel ever written, is generally read as a cautionary tale about how power poisons slowly, like arsenic, or cynicism. But it’s also a fable about history, and why, like poetry, it’s so hard to write it fast." -Jill LeporeRobert Penn Warren’s masterpiece follows the career of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for pow...

In the summer of 1863, Adam Rosenzweig has left a Bavarian ghetto and sailed for America to join the Union Army. Fired by the revolutionary idealism of mid-nineteenth-century Europe, he hopes to aid a cause which he believes to be as simple as he knows it to be just. But thwarted by the discovery of a physical deformity which he had hoped to conceal, he must try other means to find his "truth."

Robert Penn has saddled up nearly every day of his adult life. In hislate twenties, he pedaled 25,000 miles around the world. Today he ridesto get to work, sometimes for work, to bathe in air and sunshine, totravel, to go shopping, to stay sane, and to skip bath time with hiskids. He's no Sunday pedal pusher. So when the time came for a new bike,he decided to pull out all the stops. He would build his dream bike,the bike he would ride for the rest ...

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One of America's great poets writes of his father, lost through death and discovered again through insistent recollection. A death in the family forces a re-sorting and reshaping of all that we can recall of times and people gone from us as we measure our identities by their remembered images.While prowling in the past, Warren is drawn to likenesses between himself and his father, between himself and others of his family. The poet finds that his father too, in his long silent youth...

In the last decade of his life, Robert Penn Warren remained a vibrant force in American literature, producing new works of poetry and nonfiction while also dealing courageously with the gradual decline of his health and the diminishment of his poetic powers. Toward Sunset, at a Great Height, 1980--1989, the sixth and final volume of the author's selected letters, provides crucial documentation of this period, containing Warren's correspondence with friends, family, fellow writers, editors,...

In 1979 Robert Penn Warren returned to his native Todd Country, Kentucky, to attend ceremonies in honor of another native son, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, whose United States citizenship had just been restored, ninety years after his death, by a special act of Congress. From that nostalgic journey grew this reflective essay on the tragic career of Jefferson Davis—"not a modern man in any sense of the word but a conservative called to manage what was, in one sense, a revo...

In America’s twentieth century, there is no man of letters more versatile, distinguished, and influential than the poet, novelist, editor, critic, social commentator, and teacher Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989). The most intimate of Warren’s “letters,” his personal correspondence, now join his published canon under William Bedford Clark’s expert supervision. Volume One, The Apprentice Years, forms a kind of epistolary coming-of-age novel, taking Warren from the awkwardness of emerg...

Warren's first novel, set during the "tobacco wars" that raged in Kentucky and Tennessee in the early part of this century. Percy Munn is one of Warren's innocent idealists whose delusions become murderous as he attempts to define himself by action in the unfolding violence around him. Southern Classics Series.