On this day, April 24, in 1905, Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky. The only person to win a Pulitzer Prize for both fiction (All the King’s Men in 1947) and poetry (in 1958 for Promises Poems and Now and Then in 1979), he was also named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (now known as Poet Laureate) in 1944/5. One of the founders of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, he was originally a defender of segregation in the South, but later recanted and became a highly visible supporter of integration. A McArthur Fellow, he was also awarded the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died of bone cancer in 1989 at age 84.
