New and Selected Essays

by Robert Penn Warren

Essays discuss Hawthorne, Twain, Conrad, Hemingway, Faulkner, Melville, Whittier, Frost, and Coleridge.

Genres: Essays, Literature, American, Nonfiction

423 pages, Hardcover

First published March 18, 1989

About the author

Robert Penn Warren 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.

Reviews

[J. Alfred · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book that gives, to my mind, interesting ideas on literature itself, but often fails to be interesting or very enlightening on the specific authors it addresses (namely Conrad, Faulkner, Hemingway, Frost, Coleridge, Melville, Welty, Porter and Thomas Wolfe). The most interesting single essay is the one on Wolfe, and only because that's a dignified beatdown of a broken novel; the most interesting single observation I can remember offhand is the comment that As I Lay Dying 'ends in Easter, and the hope of the Resurrection.' As a person who hates Anse Bundren more than any other fictional character, I disagree. (This is the short and unemphatic version of my disagreement. As an undergrad I wrote a paper on how A.I.L.D. is an intentionally hopeless novel, and I'm sticking with twenty-year-old me over the brilliant Southern critic on this one.)
There's much that's good in here, but if you come looking for criticism on a level with the man's artistic works, you'll be looking in vain.

[Brett Warnke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each of Warren’s reviews and essays challenged the easy thinking and happy solutions we search for in life. Warren demands we look again at the texts, their unity, and reflect on the shaken values that tie society and literature. He makes us consider why we read literature, what the author’s meant and what the work asked, and more importantly what we believe after seeing the pain of life revealed in the great pages he perused and produced.