Happy birthday, Robert Penn Warren

It is the birthday of writer Robert Penn Warren (1905), whose novel All the King’s Men (1946) won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Warren also won Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. No other writer has ever won Pulitzers for both poetry and fiction. Warren also won the Congressional Medal of Freedom and served as Poet Laureate of the United States. The rise of legendary Louisiana politician Huey Long inspired Warren to write All the King’s Men, one of the best books in American literature.

Allen Tate was a Southern poet

Allen Tate

It is the birthday of poet Allen Tate (1899), who was a member of the Southern Agrarian poets, along with Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom. Tate served as poet-in-residence at Princeton University and United States Poet Laureate.

The Southern Agrarians contributed to the revival of Southern literature in the 1920s and '30s. They wrote a collection of essays titled I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, that serves as a manifesto of the tradition. Tate met Warren and Ransom when he started at Vanderbilt University in 1918.

Originally they were known as the Fugitive Poets and they published a literary magazine called The Fugitive, once considered one of the most influential publications in American letters. Also among the Fugitives were Merrill Moore, Donald Davidson and William Ridley Wills. The group eventually morphed into the Southern Agrarians and included a dozen American writers, novelists, and essayists as well as poets. Their roots were in the agrarian South.

Tate moved to New York City in 1924 and met poet Hart Crane. Tate contributed to The Nation magazine, the Hound and Horn, Poetry magazine and, eventually, the National Review. The writing didn't pay the bills, however, and Tate worked as a janitor to support himself.

He married writer Caroline Gordon and they lived in Greenwich Village and then for a time in London and Paris but after 20 years they divorced only to remarry after a year and then divorce again. They remained close for the rest of their lives.

In early adulthood, Tate espoused atheism but eventually became a Roman Catholic. He married poet Isabella Gardner in the 1950s but began an affair with a nun enrolled in one of his classes, divorced Gardner and married the nun, Helen Heinz. They settled in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he helped transform The Sewanee Review into a prestigious literary journal.

Tate's best known poem is Ode to the Confederate Dead (1928), a long poem set in a graveyard in the South in which the narrator contemplates his own mortality.

Happy birthday, William Faulkner

William Faulkner

It is the  birthday of writer William Faulkner (1897), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 for work that included The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Light in August (1932); and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice, first for A Fable (1954) and then for The Reivers (1962).

The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying and Light in August are considered among the best 20th century novels in the English language. Faulkner is regarded among the most important writers in Southern literature, including Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe, and Mark Twain.

Faulkner (originally spelled Falkner) grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, the great-grandson of a Confederate colonel who'd excelled at business, law, agriculture, railroading, and writing. After a childhood sweetheart married someone else, Faulkner went to stay with a lawyer friend in Connecticut, where he worked briefly in a firearms factory.

Faulkner tried to join the U.S. Army Air Force during World War I, but was rejected because he was too short. Instead, he lied his way into the Royal Air Force in Canada, claiming to be British. He changed the spelling of his name to Faulkner because he thought it seemed more British. Faulkner went through training in Toronto, but World War I ended before he ever saw duty at the front.

This didn't keep him from obtaining an officer's uniform and returning home to Oxford in December 1918 to a hero's welcome, regaling friends with his wartime adventures, most of them completely untrue. He even invented injuries he did not have, including a plate in his head.

Faulkner's penchant for telling a good story regardless of the facts was evident in his first published novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926), the tale of a wounded flyer who returns home to a small Georgia town after World War I, escorted by a war widow and a war veteran. The aviator's injury has left him blind and dying, and his fiance had been unfaithful. The drama includes the widow's desire to marry him. Some characters in the novel, through circumstance, were robbed of the opportunity to see combat, just as with Faulkner.

The book received mixed reviews, some writers calling it mediocre and full of uneven characters. Nevertheless, most critics found it worthy of praise. A critic wrote in The New Statesman: "I can remember no first novel of such magnificent achievement in the last thirty years."

Robert Penn Warren, won three Pulitzers

Robert Penn Warren

It is the birthday of poet, novelist and literary critic Robert Penn Warren (1905), whose novel All the Kings Men (1946) won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. He also won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979, and served as Poet Laureate of the United States. No other writer has won Pulitzers for both poetry and fiction. He also was awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom. All the Kings Men was inspired by the rise of legendary Louisiana politician Huey Long, who served as governor and U.S. senator. Warren had been grappling with the themes of political power and moral corruptions since his days as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University. When he taught at LSU, Warren watched the rise of Long and his writing developed into All the King's Men. The book is considered one of the best in American literature. Warren helped start the literary organization Fellowship of Southern Writers and founded the literary journal The Southern Review. As an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University, Warren became a member of the poet group known as the Fugitives. With some of them, he later formed a writers group known as the Southern Agrarians along with Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, John Gould Fletcher, Andrew Nelson Lytle, and John Crowe Ransom. The Southern Agrarians were largely responsible for the revival of Southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s.

See you in South Carolina this weekend

We're taking a vanload of great volumes to South Carolina.

We’re off to the South Carolina Book Festival in Columbia, S.C., at the end of the week.  It is a great show and we enjoy going each year. This is the fifteenth year of the festival, which started fifteen years after our own Florida Antiquarian Book Fair in St. Petersburg.

We’ll look forward to seeing some of our friends from the St. Petersburg show who also exhibit in Columbia.

The show draws from neighboring states. It’s a reasonable drive from Atlanta, Augusta and Savannah, Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh-Durham and even Knoxville and Chattanooga, so there’s a great mix of visitors. About 6,000 attend each year.

Festivalgoers there tend to like history, especially Southern history, so we always take along plenty of choices, including Civil War books. We also pack plenty of the works of  Southern writers, mostly dead ones. Literature by the likes of Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren still draw plenty of devotees. We’ll also have our collection of prints and maps and some of our rare and unusual books.

Of course, this is the land where such living and breathing luminaries as Pat Conroy and Sue Monk Kidd are spoken of in reverential tones, and though it's unlikely that they'll show up, the show always features what must be a legion or so of living authors.

Among our favorites appearing this year is Roy Blount, Jr., the humorist and panelist on the NPR quiz show, Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me! Many still consider him a southern writer (raised in Decatur, Ga.) even though he was born in Indianapolis and now lives in Massachusetts. Must be that Southern sensibility hewn in his formative years.

If you’re going to be in Columbia on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, May 13-15, stop by and see us. The show is in the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center. You’ll find us in Booth 408.