At the beginning of 1935, Robert Penn Warren was destined for arguably the most crucial period in his distinguished career. Having escaped the brink of unemployment the previous fall to join fellow Vanderbilt alumnus and Rhodes scholar Cleanth Brooks on the English faculty at Louisiana State University (which was enjoying a boom thanks to the favoritism shown by the Long regime), the young author was poised to establish himself, against the backdrop of the Great Depression and America’s belated entry into World War II, as a compelling new voice, perhaps the most versatile writer of his generation.
Continuing where Volume One of the Selected Letters left off, the missives from his Baton Rouge years show Warren exploring and testing the boundaries of his genius on a number of simultaneous fronts. Editing the Southern Review with Brooks was the center of his working life, and it offered him an almost immediate springboard to prominence on both sides of the Atlantic. Warren was determined to establish and maintain the stature of the quarterly even as he systematically nurtured the talent of a younger generation of writers that included Eudora Welty, Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, and John Berryman. He attended to his own writing as well and not only emerged as a celebrated poet but also published his first major fiction. During the same period, he and Brooks drew directly upon their classroom challenges to design and launch a series of textbooks that gradually transformed the teaching of poetry and fiction in American colleges and universities.
What any number of commentators have called Warren’s “protean” energy is in full evidence in these letters. The range and sheer diversity of his correspondence, whether with old friends, established literary figures, hopeful young writers, his beloved wife Cinina, recalcitrant academic administrators, or sometimes troublesome publishers, reveal an extraordinarily keen mind and heightened imagination operating in concert with optimum efficiency. Scrupulously edited and thoroughly annotated by William Bedford Clark with an eye toward the needs of the lay reader as well as the specialist, Warren’s letters have the immediacy of skillful autobiography.
