John Burt

Leverett Butts’ Heroes with a Hundred Names: Mythology and Folklore in the Early Fiction of Robert Penn Warren is a daring and insightful reading of Penn Warren’s use of mythological and folkloric materials in the four novels of his major phase, beginning with Night Rider in 1939 (Houghton Mifflin), and closing with Band of Angels in 1955 (Random House). The book reflects Butts’ deep immersion in Warren’s fiction; his grasp of Warren’s key themes and of Warren’s critique of the materialism and rootlessness of contemporary society; his sensitive understanding of the characters’ psychologies and moral predicaments; and the investment he shares with Warren in comparative mythology.

Review of Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman by Joseph R. Fornieri.

The title might give readers the wrong impression that the book concerns how Abraham Lincoln developed new concepts in political philosophy in the manner of Thomas Hobbes or Karl Marx. But the book in fact illuminates Lincoln’s thinking and acts by referring to concepts from Aristotle, Plato, and Thomas Aquinas. Lincoln is, as it were, what Plato would have called a philosopher king, not a modern philosopher who happens also to be a ruler.