New Releases by Robert Penn Warren

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, ventured into the writing of poetry, as have so many, but in time put it away for other things. Gradually this elegy for his father becomes Warren''s reverie on the many Warrens and Penns who live now only in his memory. We encounter his mother and his mother''s mother, his father''s Warren line thrown back over three generations, as he draws forth sameness, giving shape and full form and then sharp recognition to family members who were and must yet remain mysteries. Then we see that Warren is delineating the tenuous threads of all our many unsettled and fragmentary American family histories, that he is tracing all our steps from the coast over mountain trails into the dark wilderness to the west. With him, when we stop to consider our loved and lost ones, we realize the delicacy of our accepted relationships. In this autobiographical essay and the accompanying poem sequence that echoes it, "Mortmain," Warren''s look into the mystery of the past evokes for us the loss and recovery and wonder that death brings.

First published in 1965, this is a unique text in the history of the American Civil Rights Movement. Robert Penn Warren interviewed a wide range of African American leaders, activists, and artists across the country, among them Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and James Baldwin. Sections from the transcripts of these interviews are combined with the author’s reflections on the interviewees and the Civil Rights Movement as a whole to create a powerful oral history of this all-important struggle. A new introduction by David W. Blight places Warren’s book in historical perspective. " In this new edition introduced by the eminent historian David Blight, Who Speaks for the Negro? reveals a provocative admixture of history''s variance. Warren''s book is a burden of the past from which we cannot escape. It summons us to awaken a more vital national heartbeat of reparations for an American dilemma."—Houston Baker, Vanderbilt University

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 revolution." Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back is also a meditation by one of our most respected men of letters on the ironies of American history and the paradoxes of the modern South.

ufeffOriginaly published in 1958 by Random House, Remember the Alamo! is a children’s book intended for ages 9 and up. Written just three years following the acclaimed Disney miniseries, Davy Crockett at the Alamo staring Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen, the book is right out of the 1950s before “politically correct” entered our mindsets. Remember the Alamo! is the acclaimed classic accounts of one of the most thrilling moments in the history of the United States frontier. The battle for the Alamo was an epic event in the fight for Texas independence from Mexico. Davy Crockett, Colonel Jim Bowie and Colonel Travis are just three of the legendary and colorful heroes whose courageous and doomed defense of the Alamo against an overwhelming Mexican army led by General Santa Anna earned them immortality. Their valiastand and death inspired the rallying cry, “Remember the Alamo!” that inspired Texans to continue their struggle and ultimate win their independence from Mexico. As of this writing, he is the only author to have won the Pulitzer for both fiction and poetry.

In his sixth novel, The Cave (1959), Robert Penn Warren tells the story of a young man trapped in a cave in fictional Johntown, Tennessee. His predicament becomes the center of national attention as television cameras, promoters, and newscasters converge on the small town to exploit the rescue attempts and the thousands of spectators gathered at the mouth of the cave.

Originally published in 1963, this powerful novel spools a rewarding, dramatic storyline while it probes the deeper philosophical search for self-definition in modern life and the symbolic demise of the agrarian South from technological progress. Flood begins with the arrival of two men in a small Tennessee town -- Brad Tolliver, long-absent native son and successful screenwriter, and Yasha Jones, famous director and stranger to the region. Their purpose is to create a great film about the town, which will soon vanish when the massive dam being built downriver is completed. The town''s inhabitants come vividly to life as past and present forces prepare them for a climactic new beginning to their world.

John Burt’s Selected Poems of Robert Penn Warren is more broadly representative of Warren’s poetry than any previous selected gathering. More than two hundred poems from every phase grace the volume, a vehicle ideal for sampling—or soaking in—the finest of Warren’s rich output. With each poem, Burt has carefully located the version that constitutes Warren’s final revision. His introduction gives an eloquent overview of the poet’s career, touching on every published book of verse and highlighting significant lines. A “selected” collection in the truest sense, featuring several previously unpublished pieces, this treasure is at once new and familiar. At the heart of Warren’s poetry is a celebration of man’s intellect and imagination, his integral place within nature, and his relationship to time and the past; ultimately, joy coexists with the knowledge of life’s many mysteries, including its tragedies. Selected Poems, a generous survey and a convenient compendium, is the shining portal to this greatly gifted poet.

Robert Penn Warren''s 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King''s Men is one of the undisputed classics of American literature. Fifty years after the novel''s publication, Warren''s characters still stand as powerful representations of the moral dilemmas faced by individuals in positions of power. All the King''s Men had its genesis in Warren''s stage play Proud Flesh, unpublished in his lifetime. He also wrote a subsequent unpublished play titled Willie Stark: His Rise and Fall and a later dramatic version of the novel that shared the title All the King''s Men. This volume is the first to collect all three dramatic texts and to publish Proud Flesh and Willie Stark. Proud Flesh is particularly fascinating for what it reveals about the development of All the King''s Men and Warren''s changing perceptions of its characters and themes. The other plays, as post-novel writings, provide a forum for Warren to clarify his intentions in the novel. The editors'' introduction to this collection reviews the composition history of the works and their relationship to the novel and to each other. The new perspectives on Warren''s writing presented in Robert Penn Warren''s "All the King''s Men": Three Stage Versions provide a glimpse into a creative mind struggling with a compelling story and offer readers another way of looking at this American classic. This book is an essential reference in Warren studies that will give students of All the King''s Men another context from which to consider Warren''s novel.

Winner of the C. Hugh Holman Award A central figure in twentieth-century American literature, Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) was appointed by the Library of Congress as the first Poet Laureate of the United States in 1985. Although better known for his fiction, especially his novel All the King’s Men, it is mainly his poetry—spanning sixty years, fifteen volumes of verse, and a wide range of styles—that reveals Warren to be one of America’s foremost men of letters. In this indispensable volume, John Burt, Warren’s literary executor, has assembled every poem Warren ever published (with the exception of Brother to Dragons), including the many poems he published in The Fugitive and other magazines, as well as those that appeared in his small press works and broadsides. Burt has also exhaustively collated all of the published versions of Warren’s poems—which, in some cases, appeared as many as six different times with substantive revisions in every line—as well as his typescripts and proofs. And since Warren never seemed to reread any of his books without a pencil in his hand, Burt has referred to Warren’s personal library copies. This comprehensive edition also contains textual notes, lists of emendations, and explanatory notes. Warren was born and raised in Guthrie, Kentucky, where southern agrarian values and a predilection for storytelling were ingrained in him as a young boy. By 1925, when he graduated from Vanderbilt University, he was already the most promising of that exceptional set of poets and intellectuals known as the Fugitives. Warren devoted most of the 1940s and 1950s to writing prose and literary criticism, but from the late 1950s he composed primarily poetry, with each successive volume of verse that he penned demonstrating his rigorous and growing commitment to that genre. The mature visionary power and technical virtuosity of his work in the 1970s and early 1980s emanated from his strongly held belief that “only insofar as the work [of art] establishes and expresses a self can it engage us.” Many of Warren’s later poems, which he deemed “some of my best,” rejoice in the possibilities of old age and the poet’s ability for “continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth, a process that is the image, we may say, of the life process.”

James A. Grimshaw, Jr., brings together for the first time more than 350 letters exchanged by two scholars who altered the way literature is taught in this country. The selected letters focus on the development of their five major textbooks--the rationale for selections, the details involved in obtaining permissions and preparing indexes, and the demands of meeting deadlines. More important, these letters reveal their attitudes toward literature, teaching, and scholarship. Providing insight into two of the most influential literary minds of this century, these letters show two men who were deeply involved in research and writing, and who were committed to a life of travel, conversation, and learning. Their zest for life and their love of literature explain, in part, their uncanny ability to persevere and to succeed. Yet their human qualities are also present in the letters, which bring Brooks and Warren to life as rare individuals able to sustain a deep, lifelong friendship. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren will help readers better understand the critical work of Brooks and the creative work of Warren. Students and teachers of American literature will find this book indispensable.

First published in 1956, Segregation is a collection of Robert Penn Warren''s informal conversations with southerners in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Warren, who in his own writings often explored the theme of race in American life, traveled through his native region to talk with scores of individuals--taxi drivers, NAACP leaders, members of White Citizens groups, college students, preachers--to report their responses to the Court''s decision.

Robert Penn Warren choses the best of his literary and critical essays. With thirteen in all, only six of them have been published in book form before.

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.

A narrative poem based upon the heroic life of the great chief of the Nez Perce Indians, is told partly in the first person by Joseph, partly in the voice of the poet.

A collection of Penn Warren''s best short fiction: two novelettes and twelve stories that skillfully handle a variety of themes and styles."Worth reading for their craftsmanship and variety" (Charles Poore, New York Times).

Thirty-seven of Warren''s poems written between 1976 and 1978, presented in reverse chronological order.

A collection of Robert Penn Warren''s poetry, including ten new poems that have never appeared in book form and the works in previous volumes: "Selected Poems: 1923-1966," "Or else," "Incarnations," and "Audubon."