John Burt

2024 Prize Americana Winner

A Moment’s Surrender follows freshman writing instructor Paul Bishop in the aftermath of the murder of his former best friend, the renowned poet Tom Corbin. Haunted by guilt and bound by a devastating secret, Paul takes it upon himself to care for Tom’s terminally ill widow, Susan. But the truth he withholds — that Tom had planned to leave Susan for another woman, Paul’s own long-ago lover Rachel Lake — draws Paul into a painful triangle of loyalty, betrayal, and unresolved desire. Caught between the two women, Paul must navigate a web of grief and deception that threatens to undo them all.

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.

Robert Penn Warren's 1953 book-length narrative poem Brother to Dragons is not well known now. But when Brother to Dragons was published, it was reviewed, mostly sympathetically, by many of the most important poets and critics of its time, from Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell to Leslie Fiedler and Delmore Schwartz. These early reviewers focused on what they took to be the book's dark view of human nature, and on its stylistically irregular and emotionally turbulent verse, which, as Joan Romano Shifflett (2020) has recently shown, Robert Lowell later saw as leading the way towards the stylistic revolution in his own verse that began with Life Studies (1960). That the book also had something to say about the long unhappy history of slavery and racism in the U.S. was also understood from the beginning, and recent discussions of the book by Cornel West (2004), and Natasha Trethewey (2015) have shown the place of the book both in the early history of the Civil Rights movement, and in the ongoing public debate about race. My argument here is that the book, which largely took shape between the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 and the death of Stalin in 1953, touches, however obliquely, upon many of the major issues of early Cold War culture, and does so in a way that should cause us to reconsider our stereotypes about early Cold War culture.