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...

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 ...

The second novel by Robert Penn Warren, author of the Pulizter-Prize-winning All The King's Men, is a tour de force and a neglected classic.At Heaven’s Gate, Robert Penn Warren’s second novel, is a neglected classic of twentieth-century fiction. First published in 1943, it grew out of the author’s years in Nashville during a period of political and financial scandals much like those later so memorably portrayed his Pulitzer-Prize-winning All T...

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...

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 this elegant book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer explores the manifold ways in which the Civil War changed the United States forever. He confronts its costs, not only human (six hundred thousand men killed) and economic (beyond reckoning) but social and psychological. He touches on popular misconceptions, including some concerning Abraham Lincoln and the issue of slavery. The war in all its facets “grows in our consciousness,” arousing complex emotions and leaving “a gallery of grea...

Volume four of the Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren covers a crucial time of personal and professional rejuvenation in Warren's life. During the fifteen-year period spanned by this correspondence, he completed Brother to Dragons; Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South; and Who Speaks for the Negro? As these titles suggest, these years were marked by Warren's immersion in American history and his maturing interest in race relations. They also saw his return to lyric poetry, afte...

Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren, Volume three, provides an indispensable glimpse of Warren the writer and the man, covering a crucial decade in his life. Edited by Randy Hendricks and James A. Perkins, and introduced by William Bedford Clark, this collection of largely previously unpublished letters and newly discovered material documents Warren's time at the University of Minnesota, his writing and publication of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel All the King's Men,

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The years 1969 and 1979 bookend a volatile decade in American history. As an articulate witness to the era of the Vietnam War, Watergate, Jimmy Carter, and the national "malaise," Robert Penn Warren produced a phenomenal body of work, securing his place in the canon of American poetry.Volume five of Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren: Backward Glances and New Visions, 1969--1979 includes Warren's letters to friends, family, peers, editors, inquiring scholars, and critics -- reco...

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,...

The story of how one man cut down a single tree to see how many things could be made from it.Out of all the trees in the world, the ash is most closely bound up with who we are: the tree we have made the greatest and most varied use of over the course of human history. One frigid winter morning, Robert Penn lovingly selected an ash tree and cut it down. He wanted to see how many beautiful, handmade objects could be made from it.Thus begins an adventure of c...