Robert Penn Warren Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Chapbooks

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Robert Penn Warren Letters Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of U.S. Landmark Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, literary critic, and writer. He attended from Clarksville High school in Tennessee, Vanderbilt University, and the University of California, Berkeley in 1926.

Later he joined Yale University and got a bachelor’s in Litt as a Rhodes Scholar. In 1930, he started teaching at Southwestern College. Warren also taught at Vanderbilt University and LSU. He was the sole winner of Pulitzer prizes for both poetry and fiction.

The author was awarded the Pulitzer in 1947 for All the King’s Men and later won his subsequent Pulitzer awards for poetry in 1957 and 1979. Robert Warren died on Sep 15, 1989, of bone cancer.

All the King’s Men
Jack Burden is a news reporter who finds himself following the hardworking and ambitious but naïve candidate known as Willie Stark. He’s a man picked to split the votes in the primary and ensure the nominations of the crony and corrupt politician that Louisiana is famous for.

Stark is the only person with no idea that the fix is on as he sumps and receives demotivating indifference from his crowds while trying to tell them the truth.

He soon finds himself on the ropes more than he is in the ring and begins to understand that for him to succeed, he’ll have to give the crowd whatever they want.

At first glance, Willie Stark appears like he would have been the perfect party candidate. However, he uses rhetoric to stir crowds by claiming that he’s just like them and that he will bust the heads of the evil politicians and the state house forcing them to do things the right way.

On the other hand, Willie knows something about the government and uses his skills to improve the lives of the impoverished by taxing the rich heavily and using the money to construct roads and offer free health care.

He uses exaggeration, and Burden observes a candidate’s merging and an honest man’s corruption. Burden soon becomes unemployed, but Stark always liked him and gave him a high position on his staff.

Though Stark is soundly defeated, he uses the remaining period before elections to become an excellent orator and electable candidate. As Burden becomes more trapped in the shady activities of Governor Stark’s administration, he begins to stumble over his high ideas of the importance of telling the truth. He tries to convince himself that he only does what his boss wants and tells him to do.

Whatever the boss does with the information he brings to the table has nothing to do with him, but the longer he gets involved and the more people he meets who later become victims of Stark’s ambition, the less he can claim.

Burden has feelings for his childhood friend, Anne Stanton, who is the daughter of the former governor. They briefly become an item, and then they go separate ways. Burden ends up marrying Lois, a woman who is so attractive. Despite the positive attributes, the two have different ambitions and goals, and the biggest problem is that Jack is in love with Anne.

Jack becomes close friends with Anne again, and he can’t help but make allusions to his marriage proposal still applicable. Even though Anne is thirty-five and has never been married, she keeps going around the issue. However, Burden no longer sees her as a friend anymore.

Stark still sees him as among the good guys despite the number of men he has felt after being destroyed. He concluded that it would have been better to destroy rather than bribe them.

If he bribes them again, he will still have to keep the untrustworthy associates in his organization. If he destroys them, they will no longer prevent him from accomplishing his ambitious aims. He’s on a self-made mission to use the corrupt system but only for the good part.

Despite his reputation, everything isn’t really about politics at all; it’s about a man looking after himself by sieving back through the history of his own family. In the process, he discovers some skeletons from the past yet still haunting the present.

All the King’s Men is more than a bit skeptical of the realities of American politics. Jack tells the story of Willie Stark, providing the novel’s moral center. He relates the present and the past not only for Willie but for himself.

Jack came from a privileged background but later turned his back on that life by becoming a cynical political newspaper reporter in a corrupt state. He’s a friend to Adam and Anne Stanton, the children of the preceding governor.

Judge Irwin is his mentor who influenced him since his youth, and his father, Ellis Burden, is a good friend of the judge.

Jack has a future and has been working on his doctorate while studying papers of an ancestor names Cass Mastern. The papers serve as a mirror of Jack’s life. However, Mastern betrayed a friend by having an affair with his friend’s wife and lives the rest of his life haunted by the betrayal.

The novel shows how people’s actions have consequences, and everyone owes a responsibility for the consequences of their actions. The book tells the story of Stark through the eyes of Jack Burden.
A Place to Come To
The novel tells the story of Jed Tewksbury, an alienated man who’s not common in the present. He’s told in a poetic and his scholarly achievements. He gets a scholarship at jerkwater college, enters graduate school in the university of Chicago, and passes in classical and medieval literature.

Jed Tewsbury narrates a story of his life from his humble beginnings in Rural Alabama. He later joins college and becomes an expert and later joins the army. He enters his first marriage to Agnes Andresen, an intelligent scholar. Even though Jed feels lonely and distant while with Agnes, he becomes restless and loses focus when she dies of cancer.

Rozelle Harcastle is Jed’s high school sweetheart whom he walks out on a high school prom. He meets her later in life in Nashville, and they get involved in a passionate affair, and Jed realizes that his love for her is still alive but too bad for him since she doesn’t feel the same.

He goes to Paris and later to Chicago, where he marries again, gets a son, and later gets divorced.

The novel is a story in which characters learn lessons the hard way, especially Jed, who realizes that every man has to live his own life and has fewer chances of knowing what it means. After becoming a classical and medieval literary scholar and getting married twice, having a son, and having an affair, Jed Tewksbury returns to his hometown to pay a visit to his mother’s grave and make peace with himself and his past.