Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.
Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, very near the Tennessee-Kentucky border, to Robert Warren and Anna Penn. Warren's mother's family had roots in Virginia, having given their name to the community of Penn's Store in Patrick County, Virginia, and she was a descendant of Revolutionary War soldier Colonel Abram Penn.
In 1921 his left eye was removed as the result of an accident with his brother, which canceled his appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. That summer, he published in "The Messkit" his first poem "Prophecy." After graduating from a private high school at age 15, his mother enrolled him in Clarksville High School in Clarksville, Tennessee for a year because she thought he was too young to go to college. In the fall of 1921, at age 16, he entered Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, graduating in the summer of 1925 summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and Founder's Medalist. That fall, he entered the University of California, Berkeley, as a graduate student and teaching assistant, and upon receiving his M.A. in 1927, entered Yale University on a fellowship. In October 1928 he entered New College, Oxford, in England as a Rhodes Scholar and received his B.Litt. in the spring of 1930. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Italy during the rule of Benito Mussolini. That same year he began his teaching career at Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis, Tennessee.