Joseph Blotner, Faulkner’s biographer, has now brought his considerable abilities to bear on the life and work of Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989), who began as a member of the extraordinary group of writers starting out in Tennessee during the Twenties, many of them students of John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt University. Blotner vividly renders Warren’s long and preternaturally productive career and makes a convincing case for him in his crowning years as “America’s preeminent man of letters, master of genres, prodigiously creative, heavy with awards and prizes honoring his genius.”

These are high claims, but Warren was the author of some forty books, was America’s first Poet Laureate, won the Pulitzer Prize three times, and was given just about every other honor available to an American writer. With Cleanth Brooks, he edited Understanding Poetry, a textbook that made close readers of a generation of American college students, revolutionizing the study of poetry, which heretofore had focused on literary history and biography to the neglect of actual poems. Though he curtly rejected for himself the label of New Critic–perhaps regarding it as reductive—he was an ornament of the school. Blotner concludes the sentence I partially quoted above with a kind of assessment rarely encountered in the current age of the biographer as character assassin and performance artist: “Robert Penn Warren was also that rare being, a genuinely good man.”

Blotner is an old-fashioned biographer who has written an imminently readable book which puts its subject squarely at