ISSN:
0021-8758
Source:
Cambridge Journals Digital Archives
Topics:
English, American Studies
,
History
,
Political Science
,
Sociology
,
Economics
Notes:
Robert Penn Warren is a writer of extraordinarily diverse talents and interests. He is, among other things, one of the founders of the New Criticism, a poet and a poetic dramatist of national reputation (he won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his nineteen volumes of verse), and a gifted teacher. Above all, though, he is a writer whose moral and philosophical bias is towards the kind of historical specificity and social density which is perhaps the special preserve of the novel. This more than anything else accounts for the exceptional range and volume of his fictional writing and for the usual association of his name with one book in particular which is, by common consent, his finest achievement: All The King's Men, first published in 1946. Occasionally, a case has been made for the superiority of one of his other novels, and there have been one or two attempts to locate the centre of his work in the poetry. But these have been scattered, infrequent, and in the event, I think, unconvincing. All The King's Men remains his masterwork, and perhaps his most characteristic piece of fiction too, so that any assessment of Warren the imaginative writer has ultimately to focus upon it.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800011889
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