The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren (Southern Literary Studies) - Tapa dura

Robert Penn Warren was unique among twentieth-century American writers for having achieved excellence in a broad and assorted range of genres: poems, novels, plays, critical works, historical essays, personal essays, biography, and innovative textbooks. In this collection of essays, critics and poets -- among the finest Warren scholars -- assess Warren's legacy within his various genres and illuminate his centrality to twentieth-century American culture.

Although Warren was best known for his novel All the King's Men, the fact that most of these essays focus on his poetry attests to the urgency these poets and scholars feel about the need to call attention to this relatively neglected aspect of his work. Although their approaches and themes are varied, the pieces in The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren are united in their assertion that the writer's true legacy is that he was, in a century of increasing specialization, a myriad-minded Renaissance man.

David Madden is Donald and Velvia Crumbley Professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University. The author of Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War, seven other novels, and two short-story collections, he is also a poet, playwright, literary critic, and textbook editor. He is at work on a novel called London Bridge is Falling Down.