Robert Penn Warren, Shadowy Autobiography, and Other Makers of American Literature

Toward the end of his career, Robert Penn Warren wrote, It may be said that our lives are our own supreme fiction. Although lauded for his writing in multiple genres, Warren never wrote an autobiography. Instead, he created his own shadowy autobiography in his poetry and prose, as well as his fiction and nonfiction. As one of the most thoughtful scholars on Robert Penn Warren and the literature of the South, Joseph Millichap builds on the accepted idea that Warrens poetry and fiction became more autobiographical in his later years by demonstrating that that same progression is replicated in Warrens literary criticism. This meticulously researched study reexamines in particular Warrens later nonfiction in which autobiographical concerns come into playthat is, in those fraught with psychological crisis such as Democracy and Poetry. Millichap reveals the interrelated literary genres of autobiography, criticism, and poetry as psychological modes encompassing the interplay of Warrens life and work in his later nonfiction. He also shows how Warrens critical engagement with major American authors often centered on the ways their creative work intersected with their lives, thus generating both autobiographical criticism and the working out of Warrens own autobiography under these influences. Millichaps latest book focuses on Warrens critical responses to William Faulkner, John Crowe Ransom, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Theodore Dreiser. In addition, the author carefully considers the black and female writers Warren assessed more briefly in American Literature: The Makers and the Making. Robert Penn Warren, Shadowy Autobiography, and Other Makers of American Literature presents the breadth of Millichaps scholarship, the depth of his insight, and the maturity of his judgment, by giving us to understand that in his writing, Robert Penn Warren came to know his own vocation as a poet and criticand as an American.