Robert Penn Warren

Warren grew up in Guthrie, Kentucky, and became a founding member of the Fugitives, a group of Vanderbilt poets and critics who then reinvented themselves as the Southern Agrarians, defending an imagined rural South against industrial modernity in the manifesto I'll Take My Stand.

He taught for decades at Louisiana State University, where he founded The Southern Review and watched Governor Huey Long's populist machine up close, material that became All the King's Men, a bestseller and Pulitzer winner later adapted into a Hollywood film. He also cofounded New Criticism's influential textbooks, reshaping how American colleges taught literature for generations.

Named the first U.S. Poet Laureate in 1986, he remains the only writer honored with Pulitzers in both fiction and poetry. He died in Vermont in 1989.