John Burt

The breadth of Robert Penn Warren's work over a sixty-year publishing career is matched by no other major American writer of the twentieth century. First poet laureate of the United States, three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize (twice for poetry, once for fiction), he is the author of eighteen books of poetry and ten novels, including All the King's Men (1946), probably the most important novel of American politics. He also wrote several books and essays about race and segregation that helped the white South to come to terms with racial integration, coauthored Understanding Poetry (1938), a textbook that shaped how literature was taught in the United States for forty years, and was a beloved teacher.