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Kentucky Star Awards 2007
2007 Award Winners
DAVID
BARROW DICK
Awarded the Kentucky Star
for Literary Arts
Born
February 18, 1930, in Cincinnati, Ohio, David Dick was 18 months old
when his father, Samuel Stephens Dick, a physician and surgeon, died,
and his mother, Lucile, returned with her three small children to her
native Bourbon County, Kentucky.
An Eagle Scout by the age of 16, he graduated in a class of 12 from North Middletown High School in 1948. He entered the Univerisity of Kentucky that fall and was a student and member of Kappa Alpha until 1951 when he left to serve in the U.S. Navy during the Korean Conflict. He returned to UK to complete his bachelor's degree in 1956 and, later, a master’s degree in English Literature in 1964.
His first job as a writer was for WHAS Radio and Television in Louisville, where he worked from 1959-1966 and became an on-air journalist. CBS News network hired him in 1966. His first assignment was in Washington, D.C., followed by seven years in CBS’ Southeast Bureau in Atlanta, a year in the Latin America Bureau in Caracas as Bureau Chief, and the remaining years of his 19-year CBS career were spent in Dallas in the Southwest Bureau which included Mexico and Central and South America.
Dick covered three presidential campaigns by Governor George Wallace and received an Emmy in 1972 for his coverage of the attempted assassination of Wallace. A Texas Emmy (the “Katy”) was won by Dick for the report “How West Texas Farmers Cope With Drought.” Dick covered wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Beirut and Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands, and the mass suicides in Jonestown, Guyana. Other international and domestic assignments included national political conventions, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, oil spills, volcanic eruptions, and many little stories about special people who never make headlines.
Upon retirement from CBS in 1985, Dick was named Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Kentucky. Inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame in 1987, he was appointed that same year as Director of the School of Journalism, a post he held until 1993. Between 1991 and 1997, he was the University Orator.
After he retired from UK in June 1996, he taught journal keeping at Cumberland College, which, in May of 1996, conferred upon him an honorary doctorate degree in the humanities. In May of 2000 he received an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Eastern Kentucky University and on May 19, 2000, he was inducted into the Hall of Distinguished Alumni for the University of Kentucky.
In May, 2003, Thomas More College awarded Dick the Thomas More Medallion and cited him for leadership in Kentucky and “…qualities that we associate with our patron, Saint Thomas More.”
A featured speaker for the Kentucky Humanities Council, he is the back-page columnist for the widest distributed magazine in the State of Kentucky, Kentucky Electric Cooperatives’ Kentucky Living. In 2003, the cooperatives bestowed on Dick their Distinguished Rural Kentuckian Award. While he was publisher of The Bourbon Times (1988-90), a weekly newspaper he established in Bourbon County, the newspaper won 257 Kentucky Press Association Awards.
Since 1992, Plum Lick Publishing, Inc. has produced eleven of David Dick’s work including The View from Plum Lick (1992, nonfiction), Peace at the Center (1994, nonfiction), A Conversation with Peter P. Pence (1995, fiction), The Quiet Kentuckians (nonfiction,1996), and Home Sweet Kentucky (1999, nonfiction, co-authored with his wife, Lalie).
Rivers of Kentucky, (2001, nonfiction also co-authored with Lalie) is used as a graduate-level history text book by two Kentucky colleges and universities. Rivers was, in part, the inspiration for the 2005, year-long exhibit, A River Runs Through Us – Rivers of Kentucky, at the Thomas D. Clark History Center in Frankfort. It also was a finalist for the Southeast Book Publishers Association’s 2002 Nonfiction Book of the Year. Follow the Storm, A Long Way Home, (2002, nonfiction) chronicles Dick’s career as a CBS News foreign and domestic Emmy-Award-winning correspondent.
In 1998, the University Press of Kentucky chose Dick’s first novel, The Scourges of Heaven to be the first original fiction ever published by them, then in 2004, Plum Lick Publishing produced Jesse Stuart—The Heritage (2004, nonfiction), a biography of the internationally famous eastern Kentucky poet, novelist and short-story writer.
Kentucky – A State of Mind (2005, nonfiction), Dick’s tenth work and third co-authored with his wife, Lalie, is a collection of warm, nonfiction esays about Kentucky and Kentuckians.
Dick’s latest book, A Journal for Lalie – Living Through Prostate Cancer is David Dick’s most personal book. In 1993, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and over the years has seen his PSA (prostate specific antigen) number rise and fall in response to a long list of medical procedures administered by a host of skilled medical specialists.
A Journal for Lalie is a book for men who have, or may someday have, prostate cancer, and equally for the women who will follow in the Dick’s footsteps as they negotiate the same rocky medical trail with their loved ones, yet it is one that will bring hope, laughter and inspiration to the thousands who have laughed and loved their way through his previous books.
Dick is currently writing Let There Be Light – A History of Rural Electrification in Kentucky.
By a former marriage, Dick has four children, Samuel Stephens II, Deborah, Catherine and Nell, seven grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. Today, David Dick lives on a farm purchased with British crowns by his ancestor, Joshua, in 1799. His wife, Lalie, is the former Eulalie Cumbo of Woodville, Mississippi and their 24-year-old daughter, Ravy Bradford Dick, the seventh generation on this land, is a nursing student at Midway College.
WARREN HAMMACK
Awarded the Kentucky Star for Theatre
Born
in Sturgis, Kentucky, the eighth of nine children (all of whom were
Honor Students), Warren was State President of the Beta Club in his
senior year at Sturgis High School and, as reported by the Courier
Journal, ran the longest run for a touchdown in Kentucky in 1951.
Upon graduation, Warren farmed for two years before he
volunteered for the Army during the Korean Conflict and served as a
Motion Picture Photographer.
A magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown College, Warren earned a Fulbright Scholarship for study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and a Danforth Fellowship for graduate work at the Dallas Theater Center. Later, he was the recipient of a MacDowell Colony (Peterborough, NH) residency to complete a screenplay. He is the author of the play, Time and the Rock.
Warren was the Founding Artistic/Producing Director of Horse Cave Theatre where, before his retirement after twenty-five years, he produced over one hundred and thirty plays; seventeen of which were original plays about Kentucky and/or written by a Kentuckian. He has directed over seventy-five major productions in theatres from Dallas, Texas to Norwich, England including eleven world premieres.
Warren began his professional acting career in 1962 playing “Job” in the acclaimed Off-Broadway production of The Book of Job, a role he performed three seasons in Pine Mountain State Park in Eastern Kentucky. In over a hundred other productions from coast to coast, he has played opposite many talented actors including three Academy Award winners: Jon Voight, Burl Ives, and Peggy Wood. In Los Angeles, he made numerous appearances on network television and, for Kentucky Educational Television, created the lead role of “John Bumpus” in the award-winning East of Nineveh by Kentucky author, Jim Peyton.
During his sojourn in Kentucky, Warren was a member of the Advisory Group of the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies and served on the Campbellsville University Board of Advisors. In 1995 he was awarded the Kentucky Governor’s Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.
While not on the road acting or directing, Warren makes his home in New Hampshire with his actor/writer/director wife, Pamela White.
JOHN JACOB NILES
Awarded the Kentucky Star for Music
John
Jacob Niles, born April 28, 1892, was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the eldest
son of John Thomas Niles and Louise Sarah Reisch. Through oral tradition,
John Jacob learned "old timey" music from his father, a folksinger and
square dance caller. From his mother, a pianist and church organist, he
gained the more formal elements of theory and note - reading skills. At
the age of twelve the Niles family moved to rural Jefferson County, Kentucky
where Niles began collecting fold music under his mother's tutelage. By
1907 Niles had composed his first important song, Go 'Way From My Window,
based on a single line of text collected from an African-American worker on his
father's farm.
Upon graduation from DuPont Manual Training High School in 1909, Niles began work as a mechanic for the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. This job required him to make frequent service calls in eastern Kentucky, but these "business" trips also afforded him an opportunity to collect traditional Appalachian music. The First World War intervened, however, and Niles left the Burroughs Company in 1917 to enlist as a cadet in the aviation section of the Army Signal Corps.
In the service Niles served as a reconnaissance and taxi pilot, eventually attaining the rank of Lieutenant. Niles also used his wartime experience as yet another opportunity to record people's songs and stories. Ten years later his extensive notes and diaries were transformed into two volumes of war-time songs Singing Soldiers (Charles Scribner's Sons 1927), Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (Gold Label Books 1929) and a biography of the Lafayette Escadrille flyer Bert Hall titled One Man's War (Henry Hold and Co 1929).
In October 1918 Niles crashed while flying from Boulogne to Paris and was partially paralyzed. Recuperating from his injuries, he remained in France after the armistice and stucdied at the Schola Cantorum in Paris (December 1918) and the Universite de Lyon (May 1919). At Lyon he completed the popular song Venezuela based on a fragment of work chant collected from the singing of dock workers at Boulogne.
Upon returning to the United States, Niles entered the Cincinnati Conservatory where he continued his musical studies in voice, theory and opera. Three years later he moved to Chicago and spent six months attending U.S. Veteran's Music School and singing part time with the Lyric Opera. While in Chicago he also became involved with early radio performance with the Westinghouse Company.
Displeased with the progress of his operatic career, Niles moved to New York City in 1925 and took a succession of jobs in nightclubs such as the Silver Slipper. At the same time he began his writing career by publishing a series of colorful essays fore Scribners Magazinge including Hillbillies (1927), In Defense of the Backwoods (1928), The Sixth Hangar (1928) and The Passing of the Street Cry (1929). Niles also published his first musical collection, an arrangement of eight African-American spirituals titled Impressions of a Negro Camp Meeting (Carl Fischer). Subsequent works in this vein included Seven Kentucky Mountain Songs (G. Schirmer 1928), and Seven Negro Exaltations (G. Schirmer 1929).
In 1928, Niles commenced a five-year partnership with singer Marion Kerby. The duet of Niles (piano, tenor) and Kerby (contralto) toured successfully throughout the United States and Europe, performing a concert repertoire consisting entirely of arrangements of folk material interspersed with original compositions such as Black is the Color and Jesus, Jesus, Rest Your Head. These concerts were particularly noteworthy for their popularization of folk music in an art music setting.
During this period, Niles also developed a business and personal relationship with noted photographer Doris Ulmann. Between 1928 and 1933 they made four trips into the southern Appalachian Mountains where Niles assisted Ulmann with her photography and expanded his collection of traditional mountain music. Much of the material gathered during these trips was later reflected in published collections such as Songs of the Hill Folk (G. Schirmer 1934), Ballads, Carols Tragic Legends (G. Schirmer 1937) and ultimately in The Ballad Bood (Houghton Mifflin 1961).
In 1936, after a brief tenure as musical director at the John C. Campbell School in Brasstown, North Carolina, Niles married journalist Rena Lipetz. Following travel in Europe, the couple moved to Lexington, Kentucky. One year later, they settled on a farm in Clark County, Kentucky and started a family that would eventually include two sons.
At this point Niles was at the zenith of his solo concert career. He was presenting over fifty concerts annually and was invited to perform twice at The White House for President Roosevelt. Niles also made his first commercial recordings, releasing Early American Ballads (1938) and Early American Carols and Folksongs (1940) for RCA Victor's Red Seal label. His popularity was well-documented in articles such as Roger Butterfield's extensive Life magazine feature (September 1943) and the Time article which dubbed him the Dean of American Balladeers.
This public recognition also subjected him to a certain amount of scrutiny and even litigation concerning his appropriation of folk material. However, several lawsuits summarily established Niles's claims of ownership and confirmed the copyrights to his material. Nelson Stevens' writing in The Arizona Quarterly (Autumn 1948) addressed the criticism of Niles' use of fold music: "One hears stories going around to the effect that John Jacob Niles, emulating Johannes Brams, has quietly put some of his own invetions among his folk songs. If so, he is a genius."
Niles maintained an active concert and recording career during the 1950's and 1960's but he increasingly turned his attention to the composition of art music. During this period he wrote hundreds of solo songs as well as works in more extended forms such as the oratorio Lamentation (1951) and the cantata Mary the Rose (1955). The capstone of this final period of composition was the Niles Merton Songs composed between 1967 and 1970. This cycle of twenty-two songs for solo voice and piano was based on poetry of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.
At age eighty-six Niles finally retired from the concert stage and spent his remaining days working on an autobiography (unpublished) and completing a volume of poetry published as Brickdust and Buttermilk (1977). Niles died at his farm on March 1, 1980 and was buried in the graveyard of St. Hubert's Episcopal Church in Clark County, Kentucky.
John Jacob Niles was a charismatic performer whose concerts, recordings and musical publications introduced a large audience to American folk repertoire. However, Niles' background and distinctive performance practice characterize him as a "singer of folksongs" rather than a folksinger. His choice of song and style were pragmatically designed to appeal to an audience rather than a community of scholars.
As a composer, Niles was always most successful writing for the solo voice. His early works in the style of folk music have an enduring place in the standard literature and the Niles Merton Songs merit further consideration. Niles was instrumental in preserving and disseminating an American heritage but he also enriched the art song repertoire through a unique compositional approach that married traditional and originally composed material.
Most of Niles' manuscripts, recordings, letters, concert programs, publications, photographs, musical instruments, and other memorabilia are contained in the John Jacob Niles Collection of the Special Collections and Archives Department of the Margaret I. King Libraries of the University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky. A catalog to this collection was compiled by Jamie Odle Hamon and Anne G. Campbell for the University Libraries.
Niles' recordings for Tradition (1957 - 1960) have been reissued as The John Jacob Niles Collection on Gift Horse Records (G4 - 10008). A representative sampling of twenty-six of Niles' compositions is contained in The Songs of John Jacob Niles which is currently available from G. Schirmer, Inc. (1990).
ARTURO
ALONZO SANDOVAL
Awarded the Kentucky Star for Visual Arts
In
1965 Arturo Alonzo Sandoval took a beginning-weaving course while a graduate
student at California State College-Los Angeles. That same year he was ushered
into the U. S. Naval Reserve and soon was shipped off to Vietnam where he spent
time as a U.S.N.R. Officer on the U. S. S. Kitty Hawk, CVA 63 and on the U. S.
Naval Base in Yokosuka, Japan.
In 1969 he finished his M.A. specializing in sculptural fiber art. Encouraged by his professors Michael Schrier and Virginia Hoffman to consider teaching he pursued his terminal art degree at Cranbrook Academy of Art under Robert Kidd and Gerhardt Knodel, completing his M.F.A. degree in 1971. That same year while employed as manager of the Edison Institute’s Greenfield Village Carding Mill he was offered a summer teaching position at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. More job opportunities surfaced and he accepted the teaching position at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. There he began the Fiber and Textiles Program. In 1974 he joined the University of Kentucky Department of Art faculty. Sandoval was provided a large art studio and freedom to explore recycled materials for his fiber art expressions. He received a NEA Fellowship (1973) for his creative research in machine stitching and interlacing igniting a pursuit to create monumental mixed media fiber art in what traditionally are considered craft processes.
At the University of Kentucky Professor Sandoval continues his interest in teaching and his creative research. He continues to pursue the creation of cutting edge issues in his field sharing them through solo and group exhibitions. He encourages his art students to work hard, develop discipline, take risks, to be self-motivated, in addition, to participate often in campus and professional arts related events for their personal growth. Some of his art students have become professionals in the fields of craft, design, education, and arts administration while continuing their art studio careers.
Sandoval’s professional activities include being an adjudicator, lecturer, curator of exhibitions, set designer, workshop facilitator, non-profit board member, art mentor, and advisor. His fiber art works have been exhibited extensively regionally, nationally and accepted by jury into international exhibitions including the 8th and 14th Biennial of Tapestry in Lausanne, Switzerland, the Textile Triennial in Lodz, Poland, and the International Textile Competition in Kyoto, Japan. His creative efforts have been awarded two NEA Visual Arts Fellowships (1973, 1992), several NEA supported Visiting Artist Grants, two Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Visual Arts Fellowships (1987, 2006), two Al Smith Professional Service Awards (1998, 2003), the Kentucky Craft Marketing Honorary Award, the Kentucky Craft Marketing and Kentucky Art and Craft Foundation, Inc. RUDE OSOLNIK Craftsman Award, the 2003 Governor’s Award in the Arts Artist Award, the University of Kentucky 2007 Kirwan Prize, and the University of Kentucky UK Alumni Professorship Award (2007-2012).
His fiber mixed media art works are in collections as the Museum of Modern Art, NY, The Museum of Art and Design, NY, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art: Renwick Gallery, Washington, DC, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, the National Vietnam Veteran’s Museum, Chicago, IL, the Greenville County Museum of Art, SC, and The J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; several corporations as the Champion International Paper Co., Knightsbridge, OH and the Louisville Water Co. Louisville, KY; banks include Central Bank, Lexington, PNC and Bank One, Louisville; commissions include the UF&CW Union, Washington, DC, the KMSF, Lexington, and Lexington Public Central Library, KY, the GSA-AIA program, 6th District Courthouse, London, KY.
Sandoval’s background is both Hispanic and Native American (Tano). His ancestry (father: Lorenzo Sandoval, mother: Cecilia E. Archuleta) may provide clues to his interest in the fiber arts. He had been told by his mother that she wove 60 blankets while pregnant with him, but discovered at the age of 40, during a visit to his birthplace, that men on his paternal grandmother’s side have been weavers of colonial Spanish textiles for over two hundred fifty years; and they continue to weave functional craft objects in his native home state of New Mexico. What a revelation to this fiber artist who questioned why a spiritual voice told him in college “weaving will be very important to you.” Was that voice an ancestor? Sandoval wove during that discovery some of the commissioned linens for his great uncle Alfredo Cordova in the quaint Cordova Weaving Shop in Truchas, New Mexico.
There are other similarities to be found between colonial Spanish designs and Sandoval’s fiber art. The most striking are the use of symmetry in brilliant color, bold shapes, contrast and pattern. Symbolism is another design form employed by Sandoval. The Cordova weavers use traditional stylized forms to depict feathers and landscape whereas Sandoval combines complex patterned circles, flags, targets and planets. Sandoval creates a new aesthetic with his contemporary fiber art objects using 20th Century recycled industrial materials as computer tape, battery cable, microfilm, Mylar, Holographic film and Lurex. Whether using a floor loom, sewing machine, interlacing, or simply combining new age materials in collage or assemblage processes, Professor Sandoval pursues the cutting edge in his chosen art medium.
Artist Statement
What distinguishes me from other artists working in fiber is my choice to mainly explore and recycle twentieth century industrial materials that have been primarily designed as tapes or films. Incorporating them into woven or interlaced webs provides for me permutations for my design concepts which are personalized into a visual vocabulary of the sky, water, landscape; and more recently, issues related to international and domestic politics, terrorism, the total nuclear threat, the cosmic realms, and personal spiritual beliefs.
As an artist I experience the world around me with a keen observational eye. My art is graphic, abstract, and sometimes representational. The major part of my art is influenced by the lack of ethics in politics, the love of war by our government, and the relentless slow pace of social awareness and change as reported in the media; additionally, readings from Bible Revelations, Astronomy magazine, Hubbell and Chandra telescopes, the Urantia Book, and Nostradamus' predictions. It communicates my passion about life. Every day I am awed by beauty and how it influences our world regardless of the distorted and horrific conditions that permeate it. My need is to somehow find magnificence in this fodder and to create beauty from the residue of our culture. My place in the total world order is realized in the art that I create.
My initial experiences with weaving systems came in college studio courses at the graduate level. Technique was the major focus of research and was expressed by the construction of a sampler of patterned fabrics feeling no spiritual contact with the medium until I began pursuing more personal ideas, surfaces and forms. The work that resulted convinced me that weaving would add an element of expression to my ideas and would become very important to my development as a visual artist.
Throughout my early efforts to learn more concerning the fiber arts as a new movement in the fine arts, and achieving my M.A. and M.F.A. degrees, I continued to employ the floor loom for construction of art fabrics for my three dimensional forms. Researching biologically related forms and folklore ritual forms I produced sculpture related to that imagery. Some early creations were recycled in an effort to push further the relationship of my ideas as they were being formed. Some ideas from my graduate experiences were carried over and developed as I began my career as an educator at the college level. Flamboyant qualities created by using colorful and reflective materials were used in sculptures representing ESCAPE ROUTES composed of ladders ascending into clouds. This desire, to relate the transformations found in the sky, was soon refined an abstracted. A NEA Craftsmen Fellowship funded my first machine-sewn series, SKY GRIDS, from vinyl, polyethylene plastic, millinery veiling, ribbons, braids, threads, and paint. Quilting transparent layers of materials became the dominant technique in which the interior of the quilted fabric units became the major visual aesthetic concern. Strips of photo-screened vinyl were later added and interlacing was now incorporated into the development of my imagery.
In 1974 a major move to the University of Kentucky provided me with a spacious studio, research time and excellent facilities for teaching and developing my artistic expression. As an artist I firmly believe in the philosophy that work produces results. The evolution of my personal style is shaped by my choice of visual elements where growth is enhanced by variation and change. My interest in using recycled and exotic materials as microfilm, Mylar, Lurex, Diffraction Grating and other high tech products, has never swayed and the surfaces created by their layering continues to excite me. My explorations have produced a variety of aesthetic qualities of which reflections emitted from the surface textures of my forms continue to provide a kinetic dimension to my creations.
My research in design and content has included pattern in various forms, spatial depth through shape, color and line, monumental scale achieved through modular formats, and by recycling art fabrics which are lightweight, easily installed and transported. Other issues incorporate shape variation from traditional to dynamically more personal forms, combining representation with abstraction, exploring alternative image making processes as collage and photocopy transfers on acetate, paper, and fabric; machine stitching to enhance the design's texture, color, or structure.
A second NEA Visual Art Fellowship (1992) funded the introduction of kinetic elements using motorized armatures for my art quilts. Two Kentucky Arts Council Visual Art Fellowships (1986, 2006) have provided funding for more automobile industry Mylar colors allowing me the time and materials to reinvestigate earlier issues of material identity with new concerns of pattern layering in combination with basic weaving systems and quilt motifs.
Now I look forward to continued years of art making, teaching and sharing my ideas and creations with students, colleagues, other artists and the public.
ROBERT PENN
WARREN
Awarded the Kentucky Star for Literary Arts
Robert
Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Todd County, Kentucky, on April 24, 1905. He
was the oldest of three children; others being Mary, the middle child, and
Thomas, the youngest. His parents were Robert Franklin Warren, a proprietor and
banker, and Anna Ruth Penn Warren, a schoolteacher. In the fall of 1911 he
entered the Guthrie School from which he graduated at age 15. He did not then
enter college as his mother felt he was too young and went instead, in
September, 1920, to Clarksville High School, Clarksville, Montgomery County,
Tennessee, graduating after the full school year. In the spring of 1921 he
suffered an injury to his left eye from a rock throwing incident perpetrated by
his younger brother. The injury eventually led to removal of the eye. During the
summer of 1921, he spent six weeks in Citizens Military Training Corp, Fort
Knox, Kentucky, where he published his first poem, "Prophecy", in The
Messkit. He earlier had obtained an appointment to the Un ited States Naval
Academy but because of the eye the appointment was cancelled and in the fall of
1921 he entered Vanderbilt University at age 16.
While at Vanderbilt he came under the tutelage of some of the foremost teachers in literature such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Andrew Lytle. Also he became involved with two groups; the Fugitives and the Agrarians. In the summer of 1925 he graduated from Vanderbilt summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and Founder's Medalist. Then, in August, he entered the University of California as a graduate student and teaching assistant. Here he met his first wife, Emma "Cinina" Brescia. In 1927 he received his M.A. from University of California and, in the fall, entered Yale University on fellowship. In October, 1928 he entered New College at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar receiving his B.Litt. in the spring of 1930.
He secretly married Emma Brescia in the summer of 1929, a marriage that was to end on June 28, 1951. On December 7, 1952, he married Eleanor Clark. This marriage produced two children, Rosanna Phelps Warren and Gabriel Penn Warren.
Warren was a poet, critic, novelist, and teacher. He taught at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, Southwestern College, Memphis, Tennessee, University of Minnesota, Yale University, and Louisiana State University. While at LSU he founded and edited, along with Cleanth Brooks and Charles W. Pipkin, the literary quarterly, The Southern Review. As a poet, he was appointed the nation's first Poet Laureate, February 26, 1986. He published sixteen volumes of poetry and two---Promises: Poems, 1954-1956 and Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978---won Pulitzer Prizes. Warren published ten novels. One novel, All the King's Men, won a Pulitzer Prize. Two novels, All the King's Men and Band of Angels were made into movies. In addition he published a book of short stories, two selections of critical essays, a biography, three historical essays, a study of Melville, a critical book on Dreiser, a study of Whittier, and two studies of race rela tions in America. As of this writing, he is the only author to have won the Pulitzer for both fiction and poetry. Other honors include Bolingen Prize, National Medal for Literature, and Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Warren's first published novel was Night Rider, Houghton, (1939) and was about the tobacco war (1905-1908) between independent tobacco growers in Kentucky and large tobacco companies. His last published novel was A Place to Come To, Random House, (1977) which is, to a certain extent, autobiographical.
Along with Cleanth Brooks he collaborated to write the text books, Understanding Poetry, Holt, (1938), 4th edition, (1976) and Understanding Fiction, Crofts, (1943), 2nd Edition, Appleton-Century-Crofts, (1959). He was one of the leading representatives of the New Criticism and these works helped revolutionize the teaching of literature by bringing the New Criticism into general practice in America's college classrooms.
From the 1950's until his death September 15, 1989, from cancer, Warren lived in Connecticut and at his summer home in Vermont. He is buried at Stratton, Vermont, and, at his request, a memorial marker is situated in the Warren family gravesite in Guthrie, Kentucky."
Tell
me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The
name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
"Audubon": Copyright ©1969 by Robert Penn Warren--
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