Books by Robert Penn Warren

All the King's Men is considered the finest novel ever written on American politics. Set in the 1930s, this book traces the rise and fall of Willie Stark, who resembles the real-life Huey 'Kingfish' Long of Louisiana. Stark begins his political career as an idealistic man of the people but soon becomes corrupted by success.

Amantha Starr, born and raised by a doting father on a Kentucky plantation in the years before the Civil War, is the heroine of this powerfully dramatic novel. Band of Angels displays Robert Penn Warren's prodigious gifts. First published in 1955, it is one of the most searing and vivid fictional accounts of the Civil War era ever written.

John Burt's Selected Poems of Robert Penn Warren is more broadly representative of Warren's poetry than any previous selected gathering. More than two hundred poems from every phase grace the volume, a vehicle ideal for sampling- or soaking in- the finest of Warren's rich output.

Told in the distinct voices of characters long dead and now gathered at an unspecified place and time, this poem recalls events leading to and resulting from the 1811 murder of a young slave by Thomas Jefferson's nephew.

In this indispensable volume, John Burt, Robert Penn Warren's literary executor, has assembled every poem Warren ever published (with the exception of Brother to Dragons), including the many poems he published in The Fugitive and other magazines, as well as those that appeared in his small press works and broadsides.

Warren's first novel, set during the "tobacco wars" that raged in Kentucky and Tennessee in the early part of this century. Percy Munn is one of Warren's innocent idealists whose delusions become murderous as he attempts to define himself by action in the unfolding violence around him. Southern Classics Series.

Warren's first book, a biography that foreshadows the themes developed in novels like All the King's Men, portrays the flawed idealist whose violent seizure of the Harper's Ferry arsenal led to the greater violence of the Civil War. Southern Classics Series.

In these two essays, one of America's most honored writers fastens on the interrelation of American democracy and poetry and the concept of selfhood vital to each. "I really don't want to make a noise like a pundit," Warren declares, "What I do want to do is to return us-and myself most of all-to a scrutiny of our own experience of our own world."