Reviews for Robert Penn Warren

The average rating for Robert Penn Warren based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-05-27 00:00:00 Jhamari Nevitt This was the first book I have read cover to cover without stopping in a long time, and perhaps the longest book that I've read cover to cover in one sitting. It was certainly a doozy but I think it has only enhanced my desire to read more of Warren besides 'All the King's Men' and the occasional poem. It also makes me want to read Blotner's first biography, which is of Faulkner. This biography, as a piece of writing, is really quite impressive. It has the qualities of a well-written profile, as though Blotner had followed Warren around from birth to death. It has the qualities of a novel, capturing Warren's wit through recreated dialogue as well as the melodrama of Warren's first marriage. It has the qualities, too, of a great work of Southern history, capturing a great Southern intellectual's experience in and beyond the South, exploring and seeking to explain his identity, rooting him in the broader cultural, intellectual, and political movements in the South across time, and finally -- perhaps most compelling and impressively -- capturing his evolution from an affiliate of the abhorrent Southern Agrarian movement to a proponent of integration and racial justice. Warren's writings on the South suggest that human folly can come human wisdom, out of abject horror can come hope, and out of history can come a better future. He is not afraid to call what is evil, evil. His own clear-eyed assessment of the realities and evil of the South is a lesson to so-called historians whose visions have been clouded by maligned and malignant notions like the 'Lost Cause.' Leaders in governments, universities, and communities in the South today continue to peddle such false notions both implicitly and explicitly. The fact that Warren arrived at his final vision through talking to all sorts of people in Southern states captures his great hope for democracy, the same hope that emerges in the final chapter of the otherwise tragic 'All the King's Men.' Moreover, his personal growth and later advocacy for a better existence in the South serves as support for his believe that because the South had been the home of such evil and the site of such horror as slavery, segregation, and bloodshed, perhaps it might one day serve to take the lead in crafting a future that recognizes the facts of past wrongs and seeks to act on that recognition. Warren's own body of work, which is massive, perhaps is part of this project but whether or not this project is truly carried out remains to be seen.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-03-20 00:00:00 Dominic Belmonte First-rate bio by a bio pro.