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"Jayne Moore Waldrop’s Retracing My Steps is presented as a chapbook but the power of the poems inside give it the force of a fully achieved book. Waldrop’s voice is strong, clear, confident, convincing. The nineteen poems, several two pages in length, reflect the mature consciousness of a strong, observant woman who shares what she sees and hears, thinks, experiences and remembers. An occasional colloquial touch in some of the poems grounds the writing in regional earth. Retracing My Steps is a solid achievement." –Gurney Norman, Kentucky Poet Laureate 2009-2010. “Re-vision–the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.” Adrienne Rich wrote those words, imagining the rescue that happens when one woman dares to remember. In “Retracing My Steps” Jayne Moore Waldrop debuts a voice capable, not only of re-visioning her own life, but also those of countless other women….Waldrop is that rare writer who understands each and every woman holds in her body a story as big as myth, both sacred and shared. Buy this little book. Give it to your mother, your grandmother, your son. Then write the first word of your story. Jayne and I, we dare you." –Rebecca Gayle Howell. "In this debut chapbook, Jayne Moore Waldrop maps her own and her family’s journey with a clear eye and a steady voice….An added gift of these carefully crafted poems is how they call us to consider our own journeys. I look forward to where Waldrop will take us next." –George Ella Lyon, Kentucky Poet Laureate 2015-2016. --Reviews at Finishing Line Press

"They had been told their sacrifice was for the public good. They were never told how much they would miss it, or for how long." Drowned Town explores the multigenerational impact caused by the loss of home and illuminates the joys and sorrows of a group of people bound by western Kentucky's Land Between the Lakes and the lakes that lie on either side of it. The linked stories are rooted in a landscape forever altered by the impoundment of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers and the taking of property under the power of eminent domain to create the national recreation area on a narrow strip of land running between the lakes. The massive federal land and water projects that came in quick succession were designed to serve the public interest by providing hydroelectric power, flood control, and economic progress for the region, but at great sacrifice for those who gave up their homes, livelihoods, towns and history in the process. The narrative follows two women characters whose lives are shaped by their friendship and connection to the place, and goes back and forth in time to show how the creation of the lakes both healed and hurt the people connected to them. In the process, the stories focus on the importance of sisterhood and family, both blood and created, and how we cannot separate ourselves from our places in the world.

"Up until this point in American history, no poet has written an honest and believable lament about the crippling effects from the tornado swirl of a crack pipe, how a little rock being melted between thin mesh screen creates pallid smoke: a monster, a slave to the white lady that is cocaine. In About Flight, Frank X Walker gives us the beautiful ugly narrative of a brother who is wrestling with chemical dependency, and losing. The high, in all of its beautiful contradictions takes on the metaphor of flight, and so we soar through the terrible highs and lows of a protagonist who carries his family with him into the den of iniquity." --Randall Horton

"This personal poetic narrative is a historic valuable offering . . . an eagle's-eye view into what it means to be young, Black, artistic, and male in Appalachia, as one century comes to an end and another begins."-- Nikky Finney, author of "Rice."
"The poems. . .are funny and sad, tragic and hopeful, angry and determined, and as filled with generosity and love as poetry by any American writer in a generation."--Back cover by Gurney Norman.

A multi-cultural anthology of modern poetry. With contributions by: Frank X. Walker; Kathy Y. Wilson; Suheir Hammad; Kelly Norman Ellis; Christine Rose James; Ellen Hagan; Tiffany Midge; Yael Flusberg; Parneshia Jones; Patricia Smith; Patricia Smith; Roger Bonair-Agard; Hao Wang; Bianca Lynne Spriggs; Matthew Shenoda; Maria Blackhorse; Anne Shelby; Mitchell L. H. Douglas; Debra Kang Dean; Adrian Matejka; Lee Newton; and Luis Alberto Urrea.

A powerful new collection from Frank X Walker, winner of the 2005 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. Featuring 68 poems on family, place, identity, and social justice, Black Box continues the brilliant autobiographical journey of Affrilachia, the author's groundbreaking first volume of poems. "The work of Frank X Walker is an eclectic, powerful mixture of liberating style, profound insight, and unwavering organic connection to the intellectual, political, and cultural struggles of a people. He stands in the tradition of DuBois, McKay, Robeson and Hughes." -- Ricky L. Jones, Black Haze."The spirit of a child runs through the poetry of Frank X Walker's latest collection, 'Black Box'. A young, rural black boy recalls his parents, grandparents and ancestors who originally settled the land, built the rock walls and dug in the coal mines. close-to-the-bone poetry . a poet for all generations." -- Mary Popham, Louisville Courier-Journal

Winner of the 35th Annual Lillian Smith Book Award, 2004 A BookSense 76 Spring 2004 Top 10 Poetry Book!
This collection of persona poems tells the story of the infamous Lewis & Clark expedition from the point of view of Clark's personal slave, York. The poems form a narrative of York's inner and outer journey, before, during and after the expedition--a journey from slavery to freedom, from the plantation to the great northwest, from servant to soul yearning to be free. Over the course of the saga and through the poems, we are treated to subtle and overt commentaries on literacy, slavery, native Americans, buffalo, the environment, and more. Though Buffalo Dance purposely references historic accounts and facts, it is fictionalized poetry, and Frank X Walker's rare blend of history and art breathes life into an important but overlooked historical figure.

Poetry. State or province government publication.

A new collection of poems from award-winning African American poet Frank X Walker. In this creative foray into persona poems, Walker immerses himself in the life of African-American jockey Isaac Burns Murphy (1861-1896). Murphy's legendary career riveted the attention of the nation and established him as one of the greatest jockeys of all time. Walker gives us the voices of Murphy and his wife Lucy, his mentor Eli Jordan, and his parents James and America Burns. A great teaching book on the neglected history of African-Americans in the history of thoroughbred racing, the racial tension of the post-Civil War South and other important themes. The book is a compelling journey into the heart and mind, family and community of America's most celebrated black jockey.

In his latest collection, Last Will, Last Testament, Frank X Walker turns the same unflinching gaze he's committed to historic figures now towards his own lineage. As these poems bear witness in real time to his father's last breaths even as his new son takes his first, Walker serves again as the linchpin between generations. Ever a master distiller of the heart, Walker presents us with, arguably, his most complex elixir to date, best imbibed with no chaser. -- Bianca Lynne Spriggs

Around the void left by the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963, the poems in this collection speak, unleashing the strong emotions both before and after the moment of assassination. Poems take on the voices of Evers's widow, Myrlie; his brother, Charles; his assassin, Byron De La Beckwith; and each of De La Beckwith's two wives. Except for the book's title,"Turn me loose," which were his final words, Evers remains in this collection silent. Yet the poems accumulate facets of the love and hate with which others saw this man, unghosting him in a way that only imagination makes possible.

A sequel to the award-winning Buffalo Dance, Frank X Walker's When Winter Come: The Ascension of York is a dramatic reimagining of Lewis and Clark's legendary exploration of the American West. By focusing on the humanity and struggles of York, Clark's slave, When Winter Come challenges conventional views of the journey's heroes and exposes the deeds, both great and ghastly, of the men behind the myth. Grounded in the history of the famous trip, Walker's vibrant account allows York -- little more than a forgotten footnote in traditional narratives -- to embody the full range of human ability, knowledge, emotion, and experience. He is a skillful hunter who kills his prey with both grace and reverence, and he thinks deeply about the proper place of humans in the natural world. York knows the seasons "like a book," and he "can read moss, sunsets, the moon, and a mare's foaling time with a touch." The Native peoples understand and honor York's innate bond with the earth. Though his expertise is integral to the journey's success, York's masters do not reward him; they know only the way of the lash. The alternately heartbreaking and uplifting poems in When Winter Come are told from multiple perspectives and rendered in vivid detail. On the journey, York forges a spiritual connection and shares sensual delights with a Nez Perce woman, and he aches when he is forced to leave her and their unborn son. Walker's poems capture the profound feelings of love and loss on each side of this ill-fated meeting of souls. When the trek ends and York is sent back to his former home, his wife and stepmother air their joys and grievances. As the perspectives of Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, and others in the party emerge, Walker also gives voice to York's knife, his hunting shirt, and the river waters that have borne the labors and travels of thousands before and after the Lewis and Clark expedition. Despite fleeting hints that escape is possible, slavery continues to bind York and quell the joyful noise in his spirit until his death. Walker's poems, however, give York his voice after centuries of silence. When Winter Come exalts the historical persona of a slave and lifts the soul of a man. York ascends out of his chains, out of oblivion, and into flight.

The Appalachian region stretches from Mississippi to New York, encompassing rural areas as well as cities from Birmingham to Pittsburgh. Though Appalachia's people are as diverse as its terrain, few other regions in America are as burdened with stereotypes. Author Frank X Walker coined the term "Affrilachia" to give identity and voice to people of African descent from this region and to highlight Appalachia's multicultural identity. This act inspired a group of gifted artists, the Affrilachian Poets, to begin working together and using their writing to defy persistent stereotypes of Appalachia as a racially and culturally homogenized region. After years of growth, honors, and accomplishments, the group is acknowledging its silver anniversary with Black Bone. Edited by two newer members of the Affrilachian Poets, Bianca Lynne Spriggs and Jeremy Paden, Black Bone is a beautiful collection of both new and classic work and features submissions from Frank X Walker, Nikky Finney, Gerald Coleman, Crystal Wilkinson, Kelly Norman Ellis, and many others. This illuminating and powerful collection is a testament to a groundbreaking group and its enduring legacy.

DVD video. Author Frank X Walker talks about his York poems. Sponsored by Appalachian Regional Studies Center and the English Department. Filmed and edited by Joe Scartelli.

"This book was handset in Cloister Lightface type, printed on a hand-fed C&P and a Vandercook, then handbound. 400 copies were printed on Mohawk Superfine paper. A special edition of 46 copies was printed on Rives paper. ... Design, composition, printing and binding by Joanne Price, Leslie Shane, Carolyn Whitesel and Gray Zeitz at Larkspur Press."--Colophon.

DVD video. This disc is a recorded DVD and may not play on all DVD players or drives. Originally produced as a motion picture in 2001; broadcast on television on KET Kentucky Educational Television's Kentucky Muse series on February 5, 2008.
"Coal Black voices is an intimate mosaic of images, poetry, and storytelling by Afrilachian poets as they give glimpses of life in the American Black South and Appalachian region. The ensemble of African-American writers challenge simple notions of an all white Appalachian region and culture while drawing on the traditions such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and the experiences of the African Disapora. The poetry of the Affrilachian poets celebrates their African heritage and rural roots while encompassing themes of racism and Black identity. In this documentary they give voice to the pleasures of family, land, good food, artistic community, music and transformation"--Container.

VHS video. 8 videocassettes. A lecture series of visiting American writers at the University of Idaho in 2006 as part of the Distinguished visiting writers program, Dept. of English, University of Idaho.

Poetry. 104 pages; 23 cm.

DVD. Documentary films. Interviews. Furious Flower III: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2015) offers the unprecedented opportunity to watch thirty-two of today's leading African American poets reading from their work and discussing the critical issues shaping this vibrant poetic tradition. Its four video volumes compile close to five hours of highlights from the landmark national poetry summit sponsored once a decade by the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, the country's only academic venue devoted to the study of African American poetry. Together with Furious Flower I (1998) and II (2005) - now newly available - this third title constitutes a video anthology of some of the most exciting poetry and perceptive critical insights of the past decade. Any teacher, poet, student or reader who has followed the current flowering of African American verse would want to have attended this seminal event - and now on video they can. This grouping looks at the centripetal and centrifugal forces shaping Black poetry today, both collective practices and growing ties with the poets and poetry of the world-wide African Diaspora. These eight poets speak to the underlying unity of these two tendencies - a poetry deeply rooted in the history of its people. Thomas Sayers Ellis, Patricia Smith, Frank X Walker, Afaa Michael Weaver, Brenda Marie Osbey, Kwame Dawes, Samantha Thornhill, Lorna Goodison.

Honors thesis. Appalachian State University. Manuscript. Archival material.

VHS video. Frank Walker and Nikky Finney discuss and read from their poetry and answer questions from the audience. Introduction by Pat Beaver.

DVD video; approx. 111 minutes. Presents keynote dialog between Frank X. Walker and Gurney Norman about Appalachian literature and authors. Presents readings by three Kentucky authors. Master of Ceremonies, program luncheon, Robert Wallace; Gail Wells, welcome; keynote speakers: Frank X. Walker, Gurney Norman; welcome to readings, James Votruba; introdution of readers, Jonathan Cullick; readers, Gurney Norman, Crystal Wilkinson, Wendell Berry.

Fiction. 366 pages. General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1877 Original Publisher: T. B. Peterson Notes: This is an OCR reprint of the original rare book. There may be typos or missing text and there are no illustrations. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.

Fiction. Novel. 406 pages.

Fiction. 424 pages. Wright III, 5779. Sequel: The cardinal's daughter.

Fiction. 569 pages.

Originally published in 1860. Set in Kentucky, the novel tells of a scientist, Erastus Bouverie, who, subject to fits of jealousy, torments his wife, using strange chemical processes to damage those he hates.
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Fiction. 528 pages. Wright III, 5780. Other Titles: Lady Ernestine.

Juvenile literature. Sunday school literature. Juvenile fiction. 108 pages. "Written for the Board of Publication by a lady of Kentucky."

Fiction. 466 pages. Originally published under title: The romance of Beauseincourt. Sequel: Sea and shore.

Originally published in 1873.
Catherine Anne Warfield, (1816-1877), was a Southern writer of poetry and fiction, who along with her sister Eleanor, was first in the line of Percy family authors. They published two volumes together as "The Two Sisters of the West," The Wife of Leon (1843) and The Indian Chamber (1846). The poetry met with moderate success, though it is today criticized as par for its time, relying heavily on many of the days gothic and sentimental contrivances. In 1860 she published anonymously as "A Southern Lady," The Household of Bouverie, a gothic fiction in two volumes which achieved great popular success. Warfield was praised as "Shakespearean, " one contemporary writer claiming, "Of living female authors, we can openly class Mrs. Warfield with George Sand and George Eliot. " After the Civil War, Warfield, under her own name, wrote eight more novels, the two most popular being Ferne Fleming (c1877) and its sequel The Cardinals Daughter (c1877); however, no work would ever again meet the same degree of success as her first hit. Amongst her other works are: The Romance of Beauseincourt: An Episode (1867), Miriam Monfort (1873) and Sea and Shore (c1876).

Fiction. 230 pages.

Fiction. Dime Novels. 31 pages.

Fiction. 456 pages. Published later under title: Miriam's memoirs. Sequel: Sea and shore.

Fiction. 456 pages. Wright II, 2638. Published later under title: Miriam's memoirs. Sequel: Sea and shore.

Fiction. 73 pages. "An unhappy wife in Louisiana begins a clandestine correspondence with an unknown man who uses a green seal on his letters. He sends her his picture but she does not send hers. When her husband strikes her, she flees to Memphis, intending to meet the unknown, but is persuaded by her cousin to go to her mother's home in Tennessee instead. A passenger, injured in a steamboat explosion on the Mississippi, is brought to the house. She recognizes her unknown correspondent, but does not let him know who she is. He falls in love with her and proposes, although he is already married. At the same time he tells her about a foolish girl with whom he had corresponded and who wrote him silly letters. She kills him and dies insane two years later."

Fiction. 279 pages. Originally published as part 3 of "Miriam Monfort": 1876. Catharine Anne Warfield, (1816-1877), was a Southern writer of poetry and fiction, who along with her sister Eleanor, was first in the line of Percy family authors. They published two volumes together as "The Two Sisters of the West," The Wife of Leon (1843) and The Indian Chamber (1846). The poetry met with moderate success, though it is today criticized as par for its time, relying heavily on many of the days gothic and sentimental contrivances. In 1860 she published anonymously as "A Southern Lady," The Household of Bouverie, a gothic fiction in two volumes which achieved great popular success. Warfield was praised as "Shakespearean, " one contemporary writer claiming, "Of living female authors, we can openly class Mrs. Warfield with George Sand and George Eliot. " After the Civil War, Warfield, under her own name, wrote eight more novels, the two most popular being Ferne Fleming (c1877) and its sequel The Cardinals Daughter (c1877); however, no work would ever again meet the same degree of success as her first hit. Amongst her other works are: The Romance of Beauseincourt: An Episode (1867), Miriam Monfort (1873) and Sea and Shore (c1876).

Poems. "By Mrs. Catherine Ann Warfield, and Mrs. Eleanor Percy Lee; the sisters of the West."

Poetry. "By Mrs. Catharine [sic] Ann Warfield and Mrs. Eleanor Percy Lee, the two sisters of the West."

Archival material. Photographs. A carte-de-visite composite photograph of 18 southern poets numbered and identified on the verso. Poets include J. Randolph, McCabe, Mrs. Preston, Mrs. Warfield, Henry Timrod, J. Dickson Burns, Gilmore Simms, Fanny Downing, H.L. Flash, randall, Jno R. Thompson, Jno. Esten Cooke, James Barron Hope, S.T. Wallis, Judge Requier, wm. H. Holcombe, Abram J. Ryan, and Albert Pike.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this classic book is generally regarded as the finest novel ever written on american politics. It describes the career of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power. New Foreword by Joseph Blotner for this fiftieth anniversary edition. Originally published in 1946 by Harcourt, Brace, New York.

At Heaven's Gate, Robert Penn Warren's second novel, is a neglected classic of twentieth-century fiction. First published in 1943, it grew out of the author's years in Nashville during a period of political and financial scandals much like those later so memorably portrayed his Pulitzer-Prize-winning All The King's Men. Other formative elements, as he has said, "came originally out of Dante by a winding path." During the winter of 1939-40 in Rome, where the first half of the book was written, one of the most touching characters, a "Christ-bit mountaineer," and his part of the story literally came full-blown to the author in a typhus-induced delirium. At Heaven's Gate is a novel of violence, of human beings struggling against a fate beyond their power to alter, of corruption, and of honor. It is the story of Sue Murdock, the daughter of an unscrupulous speculator who has created a financial empire in the South, and the three men with whom she tries to escape the dominance of her father and her father's world. The background is the capital of a Southern state in the late twenties and the promoters and politicians, the aristocrats and poor whites, the labor organizers and the dispossessed farmers, the backwoods prophets and university intellectuals who are drawn into its orbit. Warren's picture of the South is as fresh, dramatic, and powerful today as it was when the book was first published. Its plot structure is a tour de force.

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. At her father's death Amantha learns that her mother was a slave and that she, too, is to be sold into servitude. What follows is a vast panorama of one of the most turbulent periods of American History as seen through the eyes of star-crossed young woman. Amantha soon finds herself in New Orleans, where she spends the war years with Hamish Bond, a slave trader. At war?s end, she marries Tobias Sears, a Union officer and Emersonian idealist. Despite sporadic periods of contentment, Amantha finds life with Tobias trying, and she is haunted still by her tangled past. ?Oh, who am I?? she asks at the beginning of the novel. Only after many years, after achieving a hard-won wisdom and maturity, does she begin to understand that question. Band of Angels puts on ready display 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.

In his sixth novel, The Cave (1959), Robert Penn Warren tells the story of a young man trapped in a cave in fictional Johntown, Tennessee. His predicament becomes the center of national attention as television cameras, promoters, and newscasters converge on the small town to exploit the rescue attempts and the thousands of spectators gathered at the mouth of the cave.

Originally published in 1963, this powerful novel spools a rewarding, dramatic storyline while it probes the deeper philosophical search for self-definition in modern life and the symbolic demise of the agrarian South from technological progress. Flood begins with the arrival of two men in a small Tennessee town -- Brad Tolliver, long-absent native son and successful screenwriter, and Yasha Jones, famous director and stranger to the region. Their purpose is to create a great film about the town, which will soon vanish when the massive dam being built downriver is completed. The town's inhabitants come vividly to life as past and present forces prepare them for a climactic new beginning to their world.

"A really strange and complex story of love, betrayal, revenge, and murder in a suspenseful setting."--Amazon.com.

Warren's first novel, set during the tobacco wars that raged in Kentucky and Tennessee in the early part of this century. Kentucky lawyer and tobacco farmer Percy Munn joins "The Association," a group of fellow farmers intent on breaking the economic monopoly of the big tobacco conglomerates, but in his zeal to get other farmers to go along with the association's agenda, he loses sight of his goals and his morals. 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. Originally published: New York : Random House, ©1939.

After achieving world renown as a classical and medieval literary scholar, marrying twice, fathering a son, and having an ill-fated love affair, uprooted and alienated Jed Tewksbury returns to his Alabama hometown to visit his mother's grave and make peace wit

"A moving and disturbing work--one which goes beyond events, to brood upon their meanings."--Samuel Hynes, New York Times Book Review. In the summer of 1863, Adam Rosenzweig leaves a Bavarian ghetto and sails for the United States to fight for the North in the Civil War. Fired by a revolutionary idealism inherited from his father, he hopes to aid a cause that he believes to be as simple as he knows it to be just. Over the course of his journey, Adam becomes witness to a world whose complexity does not readily conform to his ideals of liberty. When his twisted foot attracts unwanted attention on his voyage to America, he is threatened with return to Europe. He jumps ship in New York, only to be caught up in the violence and horror of the anti-draft riots. Eventually he reaches the Union Army, serving not as a soldier but as a civilian provisioner's assistant. Adam's encounters with others--among them a wealthy benefactor, a former slave, an exiled Southerner, a bushwacker and his wife--further challenge the absolutism that informs his view of the world and of his place in it. First published in 1961, Wilderness remains a profoundly provocative meditation on the significance of the Civil War and the varieties of human experience. This new edition of the novel includes an insightful introductory essay by James H. Justus, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Indiana University and author of The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren.

In the admixture of wilderness and elegant society that was 1826 Kentucky, Jeremiah Beaumont, a brilliant, imaginative lawyer, stood trial for murdering his benefactor and father figure, the politician Colonel Cassius Fort. Now all the documents are in hand to reconstruct Beaumont's life story -- his crime, his trial, his ultimate sin and punishment -- and the historian-narrator of World Enough and Time sets about doing just that. Based on the famous murder case known as the Kentucky Tragedy, World Enough and Time is, like its precursor All the King's Men, a fictional wonder that personifies history, philosophy, politics, and passion.

A collection of Penn Warren's best short fiction: two novelettes and twelve stories that skillfully handle a variety of themes and styles. Originally published in 1947.

Digital reproduction.

Poems suggested by episodes from the life and writings of John James Audubon.

The significantly revised version of Brother to Dragons appeared in 1979, twenty-six years after the original. It is, Warren wrote, "in some important senses, a new work." Told in the distinct voices of characters long dead and now gathered at an unspecified place and time, the poem recalls events leading to and resulting from the 1811 murder of a young slave by Thomas Jefferson's nephew. "R.P.W." is the narrator of the versified tale, whose poignant ending brings not only reconciliation among the ghostly figures but healing for Warren's persona as well.

"An earlier version of this poem appeared in The Georgia Review"--Title page verso. A narrative poem based upon the heroic life of the great chief of the Nez Perce Indians, is told partly in the first person by Joseph, partly in the voice of the poet.

Winner of the C. Hugh Holman Award, 1999. A central figure in twentieth-century American literature, Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) was appointed by the Library of Congress as the first Poet Laureate of the United States in 1985. Although better known for his fiction, especially his novel All the King's Men, it is mainly his poetry, spanning sixty years, fifteen volumes of verse, and a wide range of styles, that reveals Warren to be one of America's foremost men of letters. In this indispensable volume, John Burt, 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. Burt has also exhaustively collated all of the published versions of Warren's poems, which, in some cases, appeared as many as six different times with substantive revisions in every line as well as his typescripts and proofs. And since Warren never seemed to reread any of his books without a pencil in his hand, Burt has referred to Warren's personal library copies. This comprehensive edition also contains textual notes, lists of emendations, and explanatory notes. Warren was born and raised in Guthrie, Kentucky, where southern agrarian values and a predilection for storytelling were ingrained in him as a young boy. By 1925, when he graduated from Vanderbilt University, he was already the most promising of that exceptional set of poets and intellectuals known as the Fugitives. Warren devoted most of the 1940s and 1950s to writing prose and literary criticism, but from the late 1950s he composed primarily poetry, with each successive volume of verse that he penned demonstrating his rigorous and growing commitment to that genre. The mature visionary power and technical virtuosity of his work in the 1970s and early 1980s emanated from his strongly held belief that "only insofar as the work [of art] establishes and expresses a self can it engage us." Many of Warren's later poems, which he deemed "some of my best," rejoice in the possibilities of old age and the poet's ability for "continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth, a process that is the image, we may say, of the life process."

Digital reproduction.

A collection of Robert Penn Warren's poetry, including ten new poems that have never appeared in book form and the works in previous volumes: "Selected Poems: 1923-1966," "Or else," "Incarnations," and "Audubon."

Digital reproduction.

Won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1958.

Digital reproduction.

Digital reproduction.

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. With each poem, Burt has carefully located the version that constitutes Warren's final revision. His introduction gives an eloquent overview of the poet's career, touching on every published book of verse and highlighting significant lines. A "selected" collection in the truest sense, featuring several previously unpublished pieces, this treasure is at once new and familiar. At the heart of Warren's poetry is a celebration of man's intellect and imagination, his integral place within nature, and his relationship to time and the past; ultimately, joy coexists with the knowledge of life's many mysteries, including its tragedies. Selected Poems, a generous survey and a convenient compendium, is the shining portal to this greatly gifted poet.

Reprint. Originally published: New York : Alcestis Press, 1935.

Essays. Jefferson Lectures in the Humanities.

Contemporary critical opinion and commentary on William Faulkner and his works.

"Homage to Theodore Dreiser, August 27, 1871-December 28, 1945: on the centennial of his birth."

First published in 1980; digital reproduction. In 1979 Robert Penn Warren returned to his native Todd Country, Kentucky, to attend ceremonies in honor of another native son, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, whose United States citizenship had just been restored, ninety years after his death, by a special act of Congress. From that nostalgic journey grew this reflective essay on the tragic career of Jefferson Davis -- "not a modern man in any sense of the word but a conservative called to manage what was, in one sense, a revolution." "Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back" is also a meditation by one of our most respected men of letters on the ironies of American history and the paradoxes of the modern South.

John Greenleaf Whittier's Poetry was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In this volume Robert Warren Penn, the noted critic, poet, and novelist, provides a major new appraisal of the once enormously popular New England port, John Greenleaf Whittier, along with his selection of 36 of Whittier's poems. Through Warren's perceptive and illuminating discussion, the significance of Whittier as a writer for our time becomes clear. In his introduction Warren shows that Whittier's deep commitment to his fellowman, especially his devotion to the cause of abolition, profoundly influenced his writing. In his estimate of Whittier's place in literature, Warren invokes the questions What does the past mean to an American? and in this context he compares Whittier with Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and Faulkner. He finds that Whittier's "star belongs in their constellation. If it is less commanding than any of theirs it yet shines with a clear and authentic light."

In this elegant book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer explores the manifold ways in which the Civil War changed the United States forever. He confronts its costs, not only human (six hundred thousand men killed) and economic (beyond reckoning) but social and psychological. He touches on popular misconceptions, including some concerning Abraham Lincoln and the issue of slavery. The war in all its facets "grows in our consciousness," arousing complex emotions and leaving "a gallery of great human images for our contemplation." Originally published: New York : Random House, 1961 - Includes bibliographical references.

One of America's great poets writes of his father, lost through death and discovered again through insistent recollection. A death in the family forces a re-sorting and reshaping of all that we can recall of times and people gone from us as we measure our identities by their remembered images. While prowling in the past, Warren is drawn to likenesses between himself and his father, between himself and others of his family. The poet finds that his father too, in his long silent youth, ventured into the writing of poetry, as have so many, but in time put it away for other things. Gradually this elegy for his father becomes Warren's reverie on the many Warrens and Penns who live now only in his memory. We encounter his mother and his mother's mother, his father's Warren line thrown back over three generations, as he draws forth sameness, giving shape and full form and then sharp recognition to family members who were and must yet remain mysteries. Then we see that Warren is delineating the tenuous threads of all our many unsettled and fragmentary American family histories, that he is tracing all our steps from the coast over mountain trails into the dark wilderness to the west. With him, when we stop to consider our loved and lost ones, we realize the delicacy of our accepted relationships. In this autobiographical essay and the accompanying poem sequence that echoes it, "Mortmain," Warren's look into the mystery of the past evokes for us the loss and recovery and wonder that death brings.

First published in 1956, Segregation is a collection of Robert Penn Warren's informal conversations with southerners in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Warren, who in his own writings often explored the theme of race in American life, traveled through his native region to talk with scores of individuals-taxi drivers, NAACP leaders, members of White Citizens groups, college students, preachers-to report their responses to the Court's decision.

Essays.

In 1964, Robert Penn Warren interviewed leaders, activists, and artists engaged in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. His interviewees included well-known figures such as Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, and James Baldwin, as well as lesser-known individuals whose names might otherwise be lost to history. Transcripts from these interviews, combined with Warren's reflections on the movement, were first published in 1965 as Who Speaks for the Negro? This unique text in the history of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement serves as a powerful oral history of an all-important struggle. A new introduction by David W. Blight places the book in historical perspective. "Warren's book remains a luminous volume about race, racism, the South, black America, and our national destiny. We ignore or forget his work at our peril."--Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University. "Not exactly a stroll down memory lane and certainly not a song to sing, yet Who Speaks for the Negro? brings back a question one would have thought already answered. We still search America's soul for how to and who to include. This is still a book worthy of your time and somehow still a part of ours."--Nikki Giovanni. "Fifty years later, we have this archival treasure that demonstrates why the Civil Rights Movement in fact gave our land its second equality, life, and liberty movement."--Reverend James M. Lawson, Jr.

Originally published in 1929. Portrait of the tormented liberator by America's first poet laureate. 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.

The fourth edition of UNDERSTANDING POETRY is a re-inspection of poetry. Keeping it teachable and flexible, the material allows for full and innocent immersion as well as raising inductive questions to develop critical and analytical skills. Students will be led to understand poetry as a means of imaginatively extending their own experience and indeed, probing the possibilities of the self. This latest incarnation of the landmark text facilitates a thorough study of poetry. First published in 1938.

Ample collection of short stories, with essays, notes and questions for each. Third edition. First published in 1943.

4 volumes: Book A. Beginnings to 1826 -- Book B. 1826 to 1861 -- Book C. 1861-1914 -- Book D. 1914 to the present.

Fourth edition. Originally published in 1949.

Juvenile audience. Tells how the Greeks symbolized the physical earth and its components into gods. Explains how they developed stories or myths of their gods.

Juvenile audience.

Juvenile audience, ages 9+. This is the acclaimed classic accounts of one of the most thrilling moments in the history of the United States frontier. The battle for the Alamo was an epic event in the fight for Texas independence from Mexico. Davy Crockett, Colonel Jim Bowie and Colonel Travis are just three of the legendary and colorful heroes whose courageous and doomed defense of the Alamo against an overwhelming Mexican army led by General Santa Anna earned them immortality. Their valiant stand and death inspired the rallying cry, 'Remember the Alamo! that inspired Texans to continue their struggle and ultimate win their independence from Mexico.

With an introduction by Wade Hall, Morris Grubbs has sifted through vintage classics, little-known gems, and stunning debuts to assemble this collection of forty stories by popular and critically acclaimed writers. In subtle and profound ways they challenge and overturn accepted stereotypes about the land their authors call home, whether by birth or by choice. Kentucky writers have produced some of the finest short stories published in the last fifty years, much of which focuses on the tension between the comforts of community and the siren-like lure of the outside world. Arranged chronologically, from Robert Penn Warren's "Blackberry Winter" to Crystal E. Wilkinson's "Humming Back Yesterday," these stories are linked by their juxtaposition of departures and returns, the familiar and the unknown, home and beyond. Contributors: Robert Penn Warren, Caroline Gordon, James Still, Jane Mayhall, Elizabeth Hardwick, Dean Cadle, Jesse Stuart, Billy C. Clark, Janice Holt Giles, A.B. Guthrie, Jr., Hollis Summers, Ed McClanahan, Sallie Bingham, Robert Hazel, Jack Cady, Jim Wayne Miller, David Madden, Gayl Jones, Jane Stuart, Gurney Norman, Walter Tevis, Bobbie Ann Mason, Joe Ashby Porter, Leon V. Driskell, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, Richard Cortez Day, Sena Jeter Naslund, Pat Carr, Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, Lisa Koger, Barbara Kingsolver, Normandi Ellis, Guy Davenport, Kim Edwards, Chris Holbrook, Paul Griner, Chris Offutt, Dwight Allen, Crystal E. Wilkinson. Edited by Morris Allen Grubbs; with an introduction by Wade Hall and an afterword by Charles E. May.

Crisscrossing the sprawling landscape of Robert Penn Warren, James H. Justus offers us the first comprehensive survey of Warren's complete canon, including the poetry of 1980. The temptation for everyone who has written on Warren, our most distinguished man of letters still active in American literature, asserts Justus, is to analyze those themes and moral situations that, because they recur so frequently and obsessively, constitute the massive centrality of an entire corpus. Justus attempts to emphasize the ways by which we become aware of such themes and situations, the technical accomplishment of their rendering, which alone justifies our thinking of Warren as a literary artist. The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren shows how Warren's work, his fiction, poetry, literary criticism, historical and personal essays, journalism?is shaped largely by the circumstances not only of his birth and early career as a border-state southerner but also oh his training and later career as a transregional artist and intellectual. Dividing his book into four parts, Justus discusses in Part I Warren's cycle of themes, the most enduring of which is self-knowledge, the very source of Warren's life work. He devotes Part II to Warren's poetry: the mannered archaism of his early work, the increasing mastery of the tendencies practiced by his fellow Agrarians, the metaphysical mode, and the advantage of technique in his most recent poems. Part III concerns Warren's nonfiction prose, with emphasis on Who Speaks for the Negro and I'll Take My Stand. In Part IV, Justus, analyzes the novels as political and moral statements in Night Rider, At Heaven's Gate, and All the King's Men; as romance and history in World Enough and Time, Band of Angels, and Wilderness; and as art of transparency, in The Cave, Flood, Meet Me in the Green Glen, and A Place to Come To. Justus demonstrates Warren's relish for crowded densities of actuality as fulfilled in the novelist's skill in observing detail. No other writer has made so much out of our cultural artifacts. . . . WPA murals, big houses and shotgun bungalows, letters and broadsides. Warren continues in a southern literary tradition. The values of the country and small town, those affecting attitudes toward social cohesion and Christian assumptions about the nature of man, are often seen in conflict with the values of a life governed by art and the academy. Justus also places Warren's work in the larger context of the various streams of American writing of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He cites in particular Warren's unresolved relationship to Emerson and compares Warren to Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In examining Warren's technical accomplishments, Justus proclaims the novelist/poet to be a man whose distinguished career has surpassed those of Edmund Wilson and Allen Tate. Warren calls himself "a little footnote" in the long history of the intellectual tension between transcendentalism and puritanism. Certainly readers of The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren will begin to understand how Warren's discrete works relate to each other, how from poems to novels to prose, early and late, nothing is lost. The undertaking by Justus is massive; the accomplishment, monumental.

In 1976 -- the bicentennial year -- Robert Penn Warren told Bill Moyers that he was "in love with America" but his love for the nation was more often than not troubled and angry. Warren once remarked that "any intelligent person is inclined to criticize his country more strongly than he will criticize anything else. And he should It's a way of criticizing himself, too.... Trying to live more intelligently, and more fully." In The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren, a noted Warren scholar traces the evolution of our first poet laureate's distinctive stance toward the American experiment in democracy, showing how Warren sought to balance off the claims of self and society in the New World. This book surveys the full six decades of Warren's career, combining close reading with a historian's eye for social and political context. While pointedly avoiding the reductive pitfalls of the "new historicism," Clark documents the informing role the Great Depression played in shaping Warren's attitudes toward art and politics, and he demonstrates the necessity of regarding Warren's major achievements in fiction and verse as forms of "public speech." Read in this light, Warren's vision offers a set of possibilities for renego¬tiating America's covenant with its Founders on new and pragmatic terms. Based solidly on the best previous commentary on Warren and his work, Clark's study represents a new approach to its subject and incorporates insights and information garnered from the Warren Papers at Yale. A wide-ranging account of the interplay between an author's imagination and contemporary history, this book should prove of interest to all students of American culture, especially those concerned with the interrelationships of literature, politics, and ideology. Written in a lively and direct style, it will appeal to specialists and general readers alike.

Leonard Casper focuses here on Warren's five later novels published between 1959 and 1977, a period just before and during the decades when his poetry flourished. Customarily neglected by critics, those novels, Casper shows, sustained and expanded the philosophical and formal themes central to Warren's poetry and early novels, and therefore are essential to comprehending Warren's total vision. That vision - what Warren's poetry called "One Flesh" and All the King's Men referred to as the "Web Theory" of life - continued to be put to the test in the later novels, according to Casper. Through experiments with multiple narrators, stories within a story, and characters seeking a balance between self-knowledge and community, Warren enacted his own yearning for elusive wholeness. While emphasizing the metaphysical intersection of flesh and spirit that links the novels, Casper also gives a rigorously detailed reading of each text - The Cave, Wilderness, Flood, Meet Me in the Green Glen, and A Place to Come To.

Two groups which originated in Nashville: Tennessee, in the early 1920's had a strong influence on American letters. Known as the "Fugitives" and "Agrarian," they included, among others, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson and Merrill Moore. This study of their contributions is, as R.W.B. Lewis has written, "a searching, supple, and most of the time brilliantly precise account of thee writing, ideas, and attitudes of several of this century's most interesting men of letters. The book achieves a kind of finality in the handling of its subject." Mr. Stewart concentrates on the ideas, styles, themes, and widespread influence of the two groups, rather than on historical data. He illuminates the literature produced within this particular historical and geographical context. Originally published in 1965. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

America's most eminent man of letters in his later years, and certainly one of the greatest Southern writers, Robert Penn Warren has increasingly come to be known for his poetry. Ghostly Parallels is a close examination of the heart of his poetic corpus-the eight collections published between 1935 and 1976: Thirty-Six Poems; Eleven Poems on the Same Theme; Promises; You, Emperors, and Others; Tale of Time; Incarnations; Or Else; and Can I See Arcturus from Where I Stand? Ghostly Parallels shows how Warren constructed collections of poems based on common subjects and contexts and also contends that, while the poems are distinctive, taken together they reveal intricate patterns of theme, imagery, and diction within explicit sequences. Runyon demonstrates that Warren's collections are integrated, well-crafted wholes, and each poem references its predecessor-sometimes in intriguingly self-referential ways. Runyon shows that despite the many changes in diction, tone, and subject that Warren underwent in his long career, his concern for writing his poems in such a way that they could reach out beyond themselves to other poems remained remarkably constant. In the arrangement Warren gave them, his poems form ghostly parallels -an expression that appears in The Return: An Elegy, where they refer to the railroad tracks that bring the poet home to his dying mother. This return to the mother is a persistent leitmotif in the poems and forms the other major theme of this study: Warren's personal poetic myth, in which such images as golden light and mirror images are signs of the mother's presence as both Danae, mother of Perseus, and Medusa, whom Perseus confronted. Through pursuing sequential patterns as well as echoes and myth, Ghostly Parallels brings a wealth of insights to the work of this prolific novelist, critic, and essayist. An important guide for undergraduate and graduate students alike, Ghostly Parallels will also appeal to anyone with an interest in Robert Penn Warren and southern literature."

Robert Penn Warren was unique among twentieth-century American writers for having achieved excellence in a broad and assorted range of genres: poems, novels, plays, critical works, historical essays, personal essays, biography, and innovative textbooks. In this collection of essays, critics and poets -- among the finest Warren scholars -- assess Warren's legacy within his various genres and illuminate his centrality to twentieth-century American culture. Although Warren was best known for his novel All the King's Men, the fact that most of these essays focus on his poetry attests to the urgency these poets and scholars feel about the need to call attention to this relatively neglected aspect of his work. Although their approaches and themes are varied, the pieces in The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren are united in their assertion that the writer's true legacy is that he was, in a century of increasing specialization, a myriad-minded Renaissance man.

When Robert Penn Warren asks what / Is man but his passion?, he exemplifies the type of artist that the British Romantics celebrated. This study traces the development of Warren's poetic craft as influenced by that movement's ideals. "Lesa Carnes Corrigan lays out clearly the six-decades-long progression in Warren's Romantic vision - a combination of Wordsworth's tempered aesthetics and Yeats's awareness of historical violence and modern estrangement. She demonstrates how closely the poet associated his most deeply felt intuitions about art and life with the overarching philosophies of the Romantics."--Jacket. It is a detailed guide to the work of one of America's most distinguished 20th-century poets.

Though it has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize, the poetry of Robert Penn Warren still is not widely or well understood. In this study, Victor H. Strandberg redresses this imbalance by providing a comprehensive survey of the poetic canon of this gifted, complex, and much-neglected poet. Warren writes in the tradition of Western poets concerned with the painful experience of a forced, one-way passage from innocence into "the world's stew" of time and loss. This passage, Strandberg explains, results for Warren in bifurcation of the self into warring segments: a "clean" idealistic surface ego, and a polluted "undiscovered self" in the unconscious. Revelation of the "dirty" part of human personality is tellingly evoked in many of Warren's major works. As the poet's vision expands, however, these conflicting elements are unified in a "mystic osmosis of being" whereby "the world which once provoked... fear and disgust may now be totally loved." In addition to close analysis both of individual poems and of the poet's overall development, Strandberg reviews critical opinion of Warren's poetry over the last three decades and assesses his place among fellow poets. Both as "prophecy" and as "art," he concludes, Robert Penn Warren's poetry is so significant, versatile, and excellent "as to rank him among the finest and most fertile talents of his age."

Biography. Part of the University of Minnesota pamphlets on American writers, no. 44.

Revised edition. Part of the Twayne's United States authors series, TUSA 69.

-- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights -- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers

Long recognized as one of America's foremost men of letters, Robert Penn Warren continues to dazzle us with his many-sided genius. In the haunting images of his poetry, the narrative power of his fiction, the revealing insights of his essays, we find literary achievement of the highest order. Warren's writing has merited the close attention of literary critics. In this book Neil Nakadate brings together the most important critical essays, including a new essay written for this volume, to give a comprehensive view of the range of Warren's work. A list of Warren's published works, 1929-1980, and a useful checklist of critical works on Warren's writing supplement this rich and balanced collection of essays. Contributors: A.L. Clements, Chester E. Eisinger, Norton R. Girault, Robert B. Heilman, H.P. Heseltine, James H. Justus, Richard Law, Frederick P.W. McDowell, Neil Nakadate, Ladell Payne, M. Bernetta Quinn, John Crowe Ransom, Victor Strandberg, Walter Sullivan, William Tjenos, Simone Vauthier, and Robert Penn Warren

Criticism; 212 pages.

The myth of America--the gap between American ideals and the actualities of American life--is a central and controlling metaphor in the works of Robert Penn Warren. Ranging across Warren's distinguished sixty-five year career, Robert Penn Warren and the American Imagination identifies the concerns that stem from Warren's vision of American history as a struggle to restore the lost ideals of the founding fathers and shows how they resonate through his writings. From his 1928 biography of the abolitionist John Brown to the late poems of Altitudes and Extensions, Warren returned again and again to themes related to democracy, regionalism, personal liberties, individual responsibilities, minority relations, and above all the loss of ideals. Ruppersburg initially focuses on Warren's expression of these themes in three major narrative poems: Brother to the Dragons portrays slavery in all its horror and its consequences for Jeffersonian idealism; Audubon: A Vision extols the power of imagination in one man's quest to assert an American identity in the wilderness; and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce regards the victimization of Native Americans and their exclusion from traditional versions of American history as evidence of flaws in the founding vision. In his nonfiction works Segregation and Who Speaks for the Negro? Warren depicted the civil rights movement as a struggle for identity and individualism. Ruppersburg traces the development of Warren's attitudes, arguing that his support of the civil rights movement paradoxically stemmed from agrarianism, which by the 1950s meant something very different to him from the agrarianism of I'll Take My Stand. In addition, Warren hoped that the civil rights movement would restore some of the nation's original revolutionary ardor and idealism. The book closes with an examination of Warren's views on the future of democracy and the individual in a world dominated--and threatened--by science and technology. Looking particularly at The Legacy of the Civil War, Democracy and Poetry, and the poem "New Dawn," Ruppersburg concludes that Warren was skeptical about our prospects for survival. Still, through his advocacy of the arts and the primacy of the individual, Warren affirmed the values that he believed would help Western culture to endure. Robert Penn Warren sought to explore the meaning of the American experience, to validate the promise and the dangers of American ideals, and to urge the nation to take stock of itself and struggle for control of its fate in history. Through this obsessive search for America's identity, Ruppersburg demonstrates, Warren affirmed his own position as one of the most accomplished and significant of modern American writers.

In the last decade of his life, Robert Penn Warren remained a vibrant force in American literature, producing new works of poetry and nonfiction while also dealing courageously with the gradual decline of his health and the diminishment of his poetic powers. Toward Sunset, at a Great Height, 1980--1989, the sixth and final volume of the author's selected letters, provides crucial documentation of this period, containing Warren's correspondence with friends, family, fellow writers, editors, critics, and the scholars studying his works. Warren published several volumes of poetry, including Being Here (1980), Rumor Verified (1981), and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (1983), and returned to nonfiction prose with Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back (1980) and the memoir Portrait of a Father (1988). His letters reveal that he tried to begin writing a novel but was unable to make substantial progress on it, and that from 1985 on he became increasingly dissatisfied with his new poems. Until his death at age eighty-four, however, Warren maintained an active correspondence filled with news about his writings and travels, accounts of the lives of his wife and children, and a stoic attitude about his own physical decline as well as a solicitousness regarding the health of others, such as his brother, Thomas, and sister, Mary. He communicated with rising young scholars and encouraged younger poets he admired. Toward Sunset, at a Great Height offers rich insights into the closing chapter of Robert Penn Warren's professional and personal life, making it an essential resource for understanding the full scope of the author's contribution to American letters.

Sleeping with the Boss opens up the feminist critical project by showing that author gender has no bearing on the creation of feminine-structured narrative. Moreover, by exposing a considerable "female consciousness" in the major fictional works of Robert Penn Warren, it departs dramatically from previous criticism of Warren. Ferriss, a novelist as well as a critic, expands on narrative poetics to suggest that female subjectivity is the central concept in defining a woman?s narrative. Specifically, the subjective voice of a female character is present to such a degree that the traditional structures of masculine narrative (described as linear, forward moving, and authoritative) can no longer hold. Leapfrogging over existing feminist theory, she asserts that such female consciousness may permeate the writing of men as well as women. Within Warren's traditional masculine narrative style, Ferriss detects the complicating presence of female voice, with its potential to alter the focus and direction of the plot. As she demonstrates, the degree to which Warren distances himself from or steps inside his female characters? consciousness varies enormously across his career. Still, his novels reveal the consistent pattern of a major woman character in a liaison with a wealthy or powerful man; those sexual relationships, Ferriss maintains, are pivotal in establishing female personae whose subjective effect on the narrative disturbs or overturns conventional readings of the novels' meaning. For example, she presents a startlingly subversive analysis of the character Amantha Starr (Band of Angels), heretofore viewed as a simpering victim by critics. In addition to nine of Warren's novels, Ferriss critiques his book-length poem, Brother to Dragons, which in the powerful voice of Lucy Lewis exhibits the moral and narrative limitations of the male speakers even as that female voice is itself thwarted and cut off. She also explores Warren?s frequent motif of the female empty-handed gesture, reading in it the author's own assumption of the feminine perspective by expressing his abdication of narrative authority and ambivalence toward ascribing meaning. Sleeping with the Boss represents a new generation of Warren scholarship, revitalizing the poet-novelist?s complex oeuvre in light of contemporary concerns. It provokes a radical rethinking of some of the plot elements taken for granted by other critics of Warren?s work and offers a wide range of new ways to encounter his female characters.

Taking a new approach to the study of Robert Penn Warren's imposing and still growing poetic canon, Floyd C. Watkins has found in the poems what he describes as a "poetic autobiography" unparalleled in American letters. Drawing on interviews with Warren, members of his family, and contemporaries from his hometown, but keeping the poetry itself constantly at the center of his vision, Watkins shows how the poetry has grown from the experience of the boy and man and from his contemplation of his family's and his country's history. He traces through the poems a family chronicle, moving from the frontier to the late twentieth century, and set in a landscape that is clearly derived from the Kentucky of Warren's boyhood. The little town of Guthrie, divided by railroad tracks, with its two burial grounds for whites and blacks, becomes in the poems a town of both memory and imagination, peopled by characters many of whom are recognizable to Warren's contemporaries. The images of a black man fleeing through swampy woods outside the town, of a grayfaced man who led a lynch mob, of a mad druggist making a list of people to poison, all have counterparts in Guthrie's history. Then and Now is a revealing and provocative study of the poetic process in a poet who is thought of as the originator of the biographical fallacy.

Archival material; housed at Yale University. Correspondence, chiefly unsolicited fan mail, to Robert Penn Warren and/or Eleanor Clark consisting of seven autograph letters, signed, three typescript letters, signed, and two telegrams, with approximately 30 enclosures. Letters from [Antionette] Brill and the American Embassy in France concern Ms. Brill's immigration and employment with Warren and Clark. Accompanied by one signed autograph letter from Eleanor Clark to First National Bank.

Archival material; housed at Yale University. The papers consist of drafts of manuscripts and related material, correspondence, photographs, and newspaper clippings documenting Warren's life from his undergraduate years until his death in 1989.

Archival material, housed at the University of Virginia. The papers contain manuscripts of the poems, "The necessity for belief," and "Holly and hickory." In three letters Warren responds to a query re several possibilities for publishing some of his work, agrees to inscribe a copy of "Band of angels," and sends regrets that he will not be able to attend a reception for Robert Frost and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. Correspondents include Clifton Waller Barrett, Douglas Newton, and Allen W. Schultz.

Archival material; housed at Pennsylvania State University. The collection consists of five items, including: letter to Jon Carroll, 6 July 1963, answering questions and giving advice on writing; letter to Mr. Glossinger, 30 July 1983, about the sources for his book World Enough and time; Dream of a dream, an unpublished poem printed by G.K. Hall as their 1976 Christmas card.

Archival material. Interviewed by Daniel Joseph Singal on October 16, 1974. Summary: Family background and childhood in rural Kentucky; education at Vanderbilt, Berkeley and Yale; participation in the Agrarian movement; writing JOHN BROWN, NIGHT RIDERS, AT HEAVEN'S GATE, PROUD FLESH, and ALL THE KING'S MEN; editing the SOUTHERN REVIEW, 1935-42; reflections on southern politics, violence and racial thought; impressions of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Frank L. Owsley, Donald Davidson and others.

DVD. Originally produced as a motion picture in 1949. Winner, 1950 Academy Awards for Best Actress in a Supporting Role--Mercedes McCambridge, Best Actor in a Leading Role--Broderick Crawford, Best Picture--Robert Rossen Productions; 1950 Writer's Guild of America Awards for Best Written American Drama and The Robert Meltzer Award (Screenplay Dealing Most Ably with Problems of the American Scene)--Robert Rossen; 1950 Golden Globe Awards for Most Promising Newcomer-Female and Best Supporting Actress--Mercedes McCambridge, Best Motion Picture Actor--Broderick Crawford, Best Motion Picture Director--Robert Rossen, Best Motion Picture-Drama.

Based on the novel by Robert Penn Warren. Originally released as a motion picture in 1957. Special features: theatrical trailer. Hamish Bond is a plantation owner who has a secret past of slave trading. Rau-ru is a freedom-yearning slave who has been raised as a son by Bond. Amantha Starr is a fiery belle who goes on the auction block when her part-African heritage is revealed -- and is sold to Bond. She loathes Bond at first but is eventually won over.

Based on the book by Robert Penn Warren. Originally released as a motion picture in 2006. Willie Stark is an ordinary man, demanding that crooked politicians and shady businessmen in Louisiana be held accountable for the collapse of a poorly built school. Urged to run for Governor, Stark, finds his voice as a charismatic man of the people. He befriends a young idealistic journalist, Jack Burden, who eventually ends up working for him. Burden begins to question his own morality and Stark's transformation into an inflexible leader that will stop at nothing to remain in power.

By 1985 Tom Petty had already obtained legendary status. He had fame. He had money. But he was restless, hoping to stretch his artistry beyond the confining format of songs like "The Waiting" and "Refugee." Petty's response to his restlessness was Southern Accents. Initially conceived as a concept album about the American South, Southern Accents's marathon recording sessions were marred by aesthetic and narcotic excess. The result is a hodgepodge of classic rock songs mixed with nearly unlistenable 80s music. Then, while touring for the album, Petty made extensive use of the iconography of the American Confederacy, something he soon came to regret. Despite its artistic failure and public controversy, Southern Accents was a pivot point for Petty. Reeling from the defeat, Petty reimagined himself as deeply, almost mythically, Californian, obtaining his biggest success with Full Moon Fever. Michael Washburn explores the history of Southern Accents and how it sparked Petty's reinvention. Washburn also examines how the record both grew out of and reinforced enduring but flawed assumptions about Southern culture and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.