Robert Penn Warren was born in Kentucky in 1905. The son of a businessman and a teacher, he was the grandson of two Confederate soldiers, and their war stories colored his life significantly. In 1920, he lost sight in one eye, which prevented him from entering the Naval Academy as he had planned; instead, he entered Vanderbilt University in 1921. He became deeply involved with a group of Southern poets there who called themselves the Fugitives, poets who remained connected to the agrarian history of the rural south and classical aesthetics.
Warren became a graduate student at the University of California and at Yale, then spent two years at Oxford. When he returned to the United States...
