Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren was born on 24 April 1905 in Guthrie, Kentucky. He entered Vanderbilt University at sixteen, joined the circle of poets known as the Fugitives, and graduated in 1925. After graduate study he went to New College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. While teaching at Louisiana State University from 1933 to 1942 he founded The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935, and the two wrote Understanding Poetry (1938), an influential textbook of close reading. His novel All the King's Men (1946), whose politician Willie Stark resembles the Louisiana governor Huey Long, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. He later won Pulitzer Prizes for poetry in 1958 and 1979, the only person to win them for both fiction and poetry, and taught at Yale. In 1986 he was named the first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He died in Stratton, Vermont, in 1989.

Faith: Faith not well documented. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica