Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, in 1905. He studied at Vanderbilt University, the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University and New College, Oxford, and he taught at Yale. He co-founded the New Criticism movement with Cleanth Brooks.
His novel All the King's Men (1946) won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. He also won Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry in 1958 and 1979, and in 1986 he was named the first U.S. Poet Laureate. He died in Stratton, Vermont, in 1989.