Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic, and was one of the founders of The New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. While most famous from the success of his novel All the King's Men (1946), Warren also won two Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry.

Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky on April 24, 1905. He graduated from Clarksville High School (TN), Vanderbilt University in 1925 and the University of California, Berkeley in 1926. Warren later attended Yale University and obtained his B. Litt. as a Rhodes Scholar from New College, Oxford, in England in 1930. That same year he married Emma Brescia, from whom he divorced in 1951. He then married Eleanor Clark in 1952. They had two children, Rosanna Phelps Warren (b. July 1953) and Gabriel Penn Warren (b.July 1955). Though his works strongly reflect Southern themes and mindset, Warren published his most famous work, All the King's Men, while a professor at The University of Minnesota and lived the latter part of his life in Fairfield, Connecticut, and Stratton, Vermont. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Italy during the reign of Benito Mussolini. He died on September 15, 1989 of complications from bone cancer.

All the King's Men (1946) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. It portrays the dramatic political ascension and demise of Willie Stark ("the Boss"), a populist governor in the American South during the 1930s. The novel is narrated by Jack Burden, a political reporter who comes to work as Governor Stark's right-hand man. The trajectory of Stark's career is interwoven with Jack Burden's life story and philosophical reflections: "the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story." (p. 157)

The novel was an outgrowth of an earlier version of the story, a verse play entitled Proud Flesh.

 

JOHN STEINBECK 1902-1968

John Ernst Steinbeck is one of the best-known and most widely read American writers of the 20th century. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, he wrote the novella Of Mice and Men (1937) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1940), both of which examine the lives of the working class and the migrant worker during the Great Depression. Steinbeck populated his stories with struggling characters and is often considered an exponent of the naturalist school. His characters and his stories drew on real historical conditions and events in the first half of the 20th century. His body of work reflects his wide range of interests, including marine biology, jazz, politics, philosophy, history, and myth.

Seventeen of his works, including Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), and East of Eden (1955), went on to become Hollywood films, and Steinbeck himself achieved success as a Hollywood writer, garnering an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing for Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat, in 1945.

He was known by many as a regionalist, naturalist, mystic, and proletarian writer. He was also respected for his empathy for the migrant workers of the time.

The Grapes of Wrath won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and established Steinbeck as one of the most highly regarded writers of his day. Steinbeck produced several more successful works during his later years, including Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), East of Eden (1952), and Winter of Our Discontent (1961).

Toward the end of his life, Steinbeck achieved a gratifying success with the award of the Nobel Prize in 1963, and with the publication in that year of Travels with Charley, a nostalgic account of a trip across America with his aged poodle Charley. But his reputation is grounded on those earlier novels which portray California as the real and symbolic land of American promise.

Steinbeck creates vivid portraits of the landscape and demonstrates how people are shaped and manipulated by their environments. John Steinbeck's themes come from the poverty, desperation, and social injustice that he witnessed during the Great Depression of the 1930's, a time when many people suffered under conditions beyond their control. His works reflect his belief in the need for social justice and his hope that people can learn from the suffering of others. Though many of his characters suffered tragic fates, they almost always managed to retain a sense of dignity throughout their struggles.

Winter of Our Discontent (1961)

The story is about a Long Islander named Ethan Allen Hawley who works as a clerk in a grocery store he used to own, but is now owned by an Italian immigrant. His wife and kids want more than what he can give them because of his lowly clerkship.

Feeling the pressure from his family to achieve more than his current station, Ethan considers letting his normally high standards of conduct take brief respite. He finds out that the immigrant that owns his store is an illegal alien, turns him into the Immigration and Naturalization Service and receives the store by deceiving the immigrant. Ethan continues to have feelings of depression and anxiety brought about by his uneasy relationship with his wife and kids, risky flirtation with Margie Young-Hunt, and consideration of a bank robbery scheme.

The story resolves when Ethan gives the town drunk - his childhood friend Danny - enough money to get so incredibly intoxicated as to die shortly thereafter of acute alcohol poisoning; due to an arrangement made with the drunk prior to his death, Ethan then becomes a "somebody" in the town by inheriting a large, valuable tract of land needed by local businessmen to build an airport. This puts him post-story in the position of being able to get in on and even manipulate and control the behind-the-scenes dealings of the corrupt town businessmen and politicians. (Somehow Ethan assuages his guilt, having known fully well beforehand what the drunk would do with the money, apparently by telling himself that dying is what, in fact, the drunk/bum really wanted.) No longer will he or his family want for anything. Contrary to what one might think, Ethan is not satisfied with his newfound financial success. His family is not immune to problems either; his son won a nationwide essay contest entitled 'I Love America' and earns fame until it is known that he plagiarized almost all of his essay. Ethan contemplates suicide, but does not go through with it lest "another light go out," a reference to his daughter Ellen who is portrayed as a mirror image of Allen.