Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) was born in Guthrie, Kentucky. Over a period of more than forty years he wrote in an extraordinary variety of forms, his work includes eight novels and eight volumes of poetry, as well as short stories, critical essays, drama, biography, history, and two studies of race relations in America. Among his many awards are two Pulitzer prizes, for his novel All the King’s Men (1946) and for his volume of poetry Promises (1957), which also won the National Book Award. In 1967 he received the Bollingen Prize in Poetry.

At Heaven’s Gate

At Heaven’s Gate, Robert Penn Warren’s second novel, is a neglected classic of twentieth-century fiction. First published in 1943, it grew out of the author’s years in Nashville during a period of political and financial scandals much like those later so memorably portrayed his Pulitzer-Prize-winning All The King’s Men. Other formative elements, as he has said, “came originally out of Dante by a winding path.” During the winter of 1939-40 in Rome, where the first half of the book was written, one of the most touching characters, a “Christ-bit mountaineer,” and his part of the story literally came full-blown to the author in a typhus-induced delirium.…
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… the most talented writer of the South and one of the most important writers of the country.
—Sinclair Lewis
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