Warren, Robert Penn, House

The Robert Penn Warren House is of national significance in the area of literature because it was the home of one of America's foremost twentieth-century literary figures. Warren lived in the house from the time he purchased it in September 1941 until June 1942, when he left LSU for a better offer at the University of Minnesota. Although the length of association is admittedly brief, scholars regard it as a critical period in Warren's life and career. Also, the house was particularly special to Warren, as evidenced in his later reminiscences. The foregoing interpretation is based largely upon an article on the subject written by Lewis P. Simpson, Professor Emeritus of English at LSU, who also happened to know Warren personally.

Robert Penn Warren's stature in American literature is well-established; hence this nomination will provide only a summation of his life and career. Born in 1905 in Kentucky near the Tennessee border, Warren spent his early life in these two states. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1925, received a master's degree from the University of California at Berkeley, studied at Yale, and then was chosen as a Rhodes Scholar for the state of Kentucky. He earned his B. Litt. at Oxford in 1930. He then returned to his native South to teach for a year at Southwestern College in Memphis, from 1931-34 at Vanderbilt, and from 1934-1942 at Louisiana State University. While at LSU he co-founded and co-edited the Southern Review, one of the most distinguished literary publications of the time. After leaving LSU because of contractual problems, Warren, a Southerner whose main literary preoccupation was the South, never returned to the region except for brief visits. He left LSU to go to the University of Minnesota, and in 1950 moved to New England to take a post at Yale. He lived there until his death in 1989.

Because of his prodigious output, versatility, and overall genius, Warren in his later years was regarded as America's greatest living man of letters. As noted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, he "bequeathed to posterity a towering monument of creativity," including ten novels, sixteen volumes of poetry, a cycle of books relating to the Civil War, several book-length treatises on literature, not to mention innumerable critical essays and the like. Two textbooks he co-authored with Cleanth Brooks, Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943), are considered seminal works because they engineered a transformation in the study of literature. His numerous awards include three Pulitzer Prizes. In 1986, he became America's first poet laureate.

As noted previously, Warren's predominant literary focus was the South. He once said that it had never crossed his mind that he "could write about anything except the South," and that he never found another setting that "nagged" him "enough to stir the imagination." What he regarded as his "exile" from the South is the crux of the importance of his home in Prairieville. When Warren returned to the region after his educational sojourn in California, New England, and England, it was with the intention of remaining. However, in his mind, he was shunned by the South (or "evicted" as his biographer termed it) when Vanderbilt did not renew his contract and then finally when he left LSU over contractual problems. (The university would not match an offer made to him by the University of Minnesota.)

It was during the period of this final rejection that Warren lived in the Prairieville house. It was his third home while teaching at LSU, each one further and further away from urban life, to which he had a stated aversion. Warren had lived out in the country at some distance from Vanderbilt; so his choice of a home some eighteen miles from LSU is not surprising. "It must have been with considerable confidence in the future," wrote Simpson, that Warren purchased the house in September 1941. "Putting $675 down and making arrangements to pay off a note over an extended period of time," continued Simpson, "he moved to what he might well have expected would become the Warren home place. Yet within nine or ten months he had sold his newly acquired property and left Louisiana and the South for good." As Warren himself reminisced in 1980 about his time at LSU: "We were to scatter. I, for good and sufficient reason, leave my grove of live oaks, bayou, and windmill in Prairieville, which I had looked forward to enjoying for keeps. I fled to Yankee land...."

Although some would be quick to point out that Warren left LSU of his own accord, that is not the way he saw it. The question of the southern writer who largely lived outside the South was raised to Warren and William Styron in a joint interview in the late 1970s. Styron's response was that "the magnet was northward" and that he did not resist its pull because he did not want to. Warren by contrast replied: "I wanted to live in the South, you see: I'm a refugee from the South, driven out, as it were. . . . But I was let out of Vanderbilt University and had to go elsewhere for a job. I went to Louisiana State University, which was quite fortunately a very exciting place. And I left Louisiana only because I felt I wasn't wanted. I felt pressure to leave. It -- settled wasn't a choice. I had settled down and bought a house in the country for life, I assumed. I left, shall we say, under pressure of some kind or another. I wasn't fired. I left out of pride. . . . The point is that I, unlike Bill, didn't make a choice of living outside the South. I always felt myself somehow squeezed out of the South, ..."

Simpson regards the period in the spring of 1942 when Warren wrestled with leaving LSU (and by extension, leaving the South) as a crisis period -- one that caused him a great deal of pain. And, of course, the foregoing comments from Warren substantiate this conclusion. He certainly considered it a watershed in his life. And since by definition, a writer's work has elements of the autobiographical in it, Simpson feels that Warren's sense of exile had an influence upon his writing. He cites the novels All the King's Men, Flood, and A Place to Come To as examples, noting that "in important ways, each is a shadowy autobiographical response to Warren's experience of leaving Louisiana and the South in 1942."

In summation, Warren's house in Prairieville merits a National Register listing because it was his home during this critical period, his home when he was "squeezed out of the South," a home he referred to fondly when reminiscing about
his exile.