America's Most Under-Read Novelist - Robert Penn Warren

America's first poet laureate, Robert Penn Warren, was also a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. In fact, Robert Penn Warren is the only American to win the Pulitzer for both poetry and fiction.

Warren's greatest novel, All the King's Men has been adapted successfully to film, garnering a Best Picture Academy Award (1958). More recently All the King's Men was re-made by Sean Penn (2006). It is this book and the movie versions of it that keep Robert Penn Warren on the map. Because the success of All the King's Men currently outstrips the reputations of all Robert Penn Warren's other work, one might believe Warren was a "one hit wonder", producing a single important, memorable work. One may judge his other pieces to be unworthy of taking the time to read them.

This judgment would be far from accurate.

Robert Penn Warren's poetry remains a staple in American poetry anthologies. But, more impressive and, in this writer's view, accomplished were Warren's novels.

The novels of Robert Penn Warren demonstrate a sensitivity to rhythm in language that comes straight from his poetry. The prose is immanently readable and fluid. When read aloud, the novels come to life.

However, the sound of his prose ranks a notch below his greatest strength as a novelist: Warren knew how to develop highly complex and interesting themes.

Identity and ambition are the two most prominent and recurrent themes in his novels and the poet/novelist Robert Penn Warren deftly explores both.

Both these themes are riddled with angst in his novels as the ideas of identity and ambition are in life.

The angst, the dark moments of the soul, the yearning and the terrific anxiety of initial success all take center stage in Robert Penn Warren's novels.

The passionate complaint of the soul in doubt is the core of Warren's characters and the poetic module from which they spring.

This passion, it must be admitted, can sometimes become maudlin and over-ripe. There are moments in Warren's novels when the soul's complaint becomes so heavy as to seem somewhat immature. Perhaps it is the fervor, the tendency toward adolescent self-importance of his characters that distances the novels of Robert Penn Warren from the critical acclaim they otherwise deserve.

Many of Warren's novel's titles were underwritten with the phrase "A Romance". This may explain the high-dramatic voice that his characters take on in certain moments. The writing does not suffer every time the story turns to melodrama. The opposite can be true in fact.

The one weakness of his writing is the occasional over-play of this high-drama.

Robert Penn Warren's greatest achievement, All the King's Men does not even skirt the arena of melodrama and it belongs to the rarified class of great American novels. The same cannot be said of his other novels, although I read everything I can find by Warren and I re-read it too. To protect the meaning of the term "great novel" we have to be very discerning as to what is included in the category.

With that in mind, All the King's Men certainly belongs in the small group of great American novels along with Absalom, Absalom, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury, Herzog and a few more.

America has produced a number of highly talented novelists, but the number of truly great novelists is actually very small. There are the few great writers and then there are a dozen or twenty really good ones - novelists, that is.

While it would be difficult to argue that Robert Penn Warren belongs in the same class as Hemingway and Faulkner, he produced as many masterpieces as F. Scott Fitzgerald (1), which is one more than almost everybody else.

Of the many novels of Robert Penn Warren the following most clearly demonstrate his talents, his vision, and his flexibility: Band of Angels, Flood; World Enough and Time.