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.

"A fully restored American political classic. . . . Now we can read it as it was written." --"Chicago Tribune"
Winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize, "All the King's Men" is one of the most famous and widely read works in American literature, and as relevant today as it was fifty years ago. Now it has been fully restored and reintroduced by literary scholar Noel Polk, textual editor of the works of William Faulkner. Polk presents the novel as it was originally written, revealing even greater energy, excitement, complexity, and subtlety of character in this landmark of letters.
"[Polk] should be commended for this restored edition of Warren's great novel. . . . Deeply imagined, beautifully written, ["All the King's Men"] is both a reckoning with the deepest forces of life and an edge-of-your seat page-turner."--"The Raleigh News and Observer"
"To read ["All the King's Men"] in this new edition is to be struck again by its raw power, its urgency and relevance."--"New Orleans Times-Picayune"
"The publication of a new, corrected edition of "All the King's Men" is welcome news for all who care about American literature." -- Joseph Blotner, author of "Robert Penn Warren: A Biography"
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), America's first Poet Laureate, won three Pulitzer Prizes and virtually every other major award given to U.S. writers.
Noel Polk is a professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. He lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
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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.

WarrenAIs first book, a biography that foreshadows the themes developed in novels like All the King's Men, portrays the flawed idealist whose violent seizure of the Harper's Ferry arsenal led to the greater violence of the Civil War. Southern Classics Series.

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

In 1979 Robert Penn Warren returned to his native Todd County, 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 wisest and most beloved men of letters on the ironies of American history and the paradoxes of the modern South.

" Considered her finest work and an American classic, Roberts's novel traces the coming of age of Ellen Chesser, the daughter of a poor itinerant farmer. Against all privations and the forces that would subdue her, Ellen is sustained by a sense of wonder and by an awareness of her own being. Reduced to the bare elements of life, her world becomes a ceremony of daily duties that bind her to the natural world and her family. The Time of Man stands as a beautifully written tribute to the human spirit.

Set in the '30s, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel traces the rise and fall of demagogue Willie Stark, a fictional character who resembles the real-life Huey "Kingfish" Long of Louisiana. Stark begins his political career as an idealistic man of the people but soon becomes corrupted by success and caught between dreams of service and an insatiable lust for power. The model for 1996's best-selling novel, Primary Colors, and as relevant today as it was fifty years ago, All the King's Men is one of the classics of American literature.

All the King's Men is considered the finest novel ever written on American politics. Set in the 1930s, this book traces the rise and fall of Willie Stark, who resembles the real-life Huey 'Kingfish' Long of Louisiana. Stark begins his political career as an idealistic man of the people but soon becomes corrupted by success.

This is a new release of the original 1961 edition.

Contributing Authors Include Nathan Scott, Walter Sullivan, Herbert Read, And Many Others.

Portrait of the tormented liberator by America's first poet laureate.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

In the summer of 1863, Adam Rosenzweig leaves a Bavarian ghetto and sails for the United States to fight for the North in the Civil War. Fired by revolutionary idealism inherited from his father, he hopes to aid a cause that he believes to be as simple as he knows it to be just.

Over the course of his journey, Adam becomes a witness to a world whose complexity does not readily conform to his ideals of liberty. When his twisted foot attracts unwanted attention on his voyage to America, he is threatened with return to Europe. He jumps ship in New York, only to be caught up in the violence and horror of the anti-draft riots. Eventually he reaches the Union Army, serving not as a soldier but as a civilian provisioner's assistant. Adam's encounters with others -- among them a wealthy benefactor, a former slave, an exiled Southerner, a bushwhacker and his wife -- further challenge the absolutism that informs his view of the world and of his place in it.

First published in 1961, Wilderness remains a profoundly provocative meditation on the significance of the Civil War and the varieties of human experience. This new edition of the novel includes an insightful introductory essay by James H. Justus, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Indiana University and author of The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren.

In the summer of 1863, Adam Rosenzweig leaves a Bavarian ghetto and sails for the United States to fight for the North in the Civil War. Fired by revolutionary idealism inherited from his father, he hopes to aid a cause that he believes to be as simple as he knows it to be just.

Over the course of his journey, Adam becomes a witness to a world whose complexity does not readily conform to his ideals of liberty. When his twisted foot attracts unwanted attention on his voyage to America, he is threatened with return to Europe. He jumps ship in New York, only to be caught up in the violence and horror of the anti-draft riots. Eventually he reaches the Union Army, serving not as a soldier but as a civilian provisioner's assistant. Adam's encounters with others -- among them a wealthy benefactor, a former slave, an exiled Southerner, a bushwhacker and his wife -- further challenge the absolutism that informs his view of the world and of his place in it.

First published in 1961, Wilderness remains a profoundly provocative meditation on the significance of the Civil War and the varieties of human experience. This new edition of the novel includes an insightful introductory essay by James H. Justus, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Indiana University and author of The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren.

John Burt's Selected Poems of Robert Penn Warren is more broadly representative of Warren's poetry than any previous such gartering. 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.

Burt showcases some very early verse, such as "The Bird and the Stone" and "Oxford City Wall", the only poem known to derive from Warren's days as a Rhodes scholar. There are also portions from the book-length poems, Brother to Dragons and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. Arranged chronologically, the selections run the course from darker, more self-consciously formal poems of the 1920s and early 1930s, including "Kentucky Mountain Farm", "Terror", and the most ambitious poem of Warren's early phase, "The Ballad of Billie Potts"; to a looser style and a fusion of personal and political concerns in the 1950s and 1960s.

Warren's late phase yielded more than half of his entire poetic opus. A new stylistic boldness elevates his poems to the sublime from 1968 to 1985, as exemplified in the intense "Island of Summer" sequence, the violence-filled "Natural History", and his most famous poem, "Evening Hawk". In his final working years there surfaces a kind of shadow autobiography in verse as well as a self-doubt that edges at times toward despair --as revealed in Warren's darkest meditation on American history, "Going West" -- before the calmer and more reflective mode of his last volume, which also contains the Hiroshima atom-bombing reconsideration "New Dawn".

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.

The significantly revised version of Brother to Dragons appeared in 1979, twenty-six years after the original. It is, Warren wrote, ""in some important senses, a new work."" Told in the distinct voices of characters long dead and now gathered at an unspecified place and time, the poem recalls events leading to and resulting from the 1811 murder of a young slave by Thomas Jefferson's nephew. ""R.P.W."" is the narrator of the versified tale, whose poignant ending brings not only reconciliation among the ghostly figures but healing for Warren's persona as well.

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.

Amantha Starr, born and raised by a doting father on a Kentucky plantation in the years before the Civil War, is the heroine of this powerfully dramatic novel. At her father's death Amantha learns that her mother was a slave and that she, too, is to be sold into servitude. What follows is a vast panorama of one of the most turbulent periods of American history as seen through the eyes of this star-crossed young woman. Amantha soon finds herself in New Orleans, where she spends the war years with Hamish Bond, a slave trader. At war's end, she marries Tobias Sears, a Union officer and Emersonian idealist. Despite sporadic periods of contentment; Amantha finds life with Tobias trying, and she is haunted still by her tangled past. Oh, who am I? she asks at the beginning of the novel. Only after many years, after achieving a hard-won wisdom and maturity, does she begin to understand the answer to that question. Band of Angels puts on ready display Robert Penn Warren's prodigious gifts. First published in 1955, it is one of the most searing and vivid fictional accounts of the Civil War era ever written.

Warren brings to this task his critical acuteness as a historian . . ., his verbal sensitivity as a novelist, and his insight as a poet.-David Donald, New York Times Book Review. Here is a perfect gem of a book. . . . Here is something sound and meaty about the place of the Civil War in American history and its place in American thinking.-Chicago Sunday Tribune. A brilliant piece of work, quick and sharp with insight, yet compassionate. A stimulating book.-New Yorker. A thoughtful discussion . . . stimulating to any reader conscious of the American heritage.-Library Journal. 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 great human images for our contemplation. A distinguished poet, novelist, and historian, Robert Penn Warren wrote The Legacy of the Civil War for the centennial in 1961. Introducing this edition is Howard Jones, University Research Professor and chair of the History Department at the University of Alabama. His works include Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War, also available as a Bison Book.