Robert Penn Warren, born April 24, 1905

After a great blow, or crisis, after the first shock and then after the nerves have stopped screaming and twitching, you settle down to the new condition of things and feel that all possibility of change has been used up. You adjust yourself, and are sure that the new equilibrium is for eternity. . . . But if anything is certain it is that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over, and it isn't the game that is over, it is just an inning, and that game has a lot more than nine innings. When the game stops it will be called on account of darkness. But it is a long day.

—Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men 

Robert Penn Warren is one of the most gifted and prolific American authors of the latter twentieth century; his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the King's Men (1946) is one of the most significant books in American literature. Educated at Vanderbilt, Warren first gained attention as one of the "Agrarians," a group of conservative southern writers who wanted to slow social change, especially in race relations. Warren was too progressive for the group and subsequently recanted his early support for racial segregation, becoming an important voice for integration.

Warren made the South the theme of his writings, which were voluminous. A major novelist, he was also an important poet, one whose combination of the vernacular and modernism achieved the fusion of the old and the new, which he had attempted to find—unsuccessfully—with the Agrarians. He was twice poet laureate of the United States.