The Legacy of the Civil War

Description

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Customer Reviews

Good writing is always in style
As the centennial of the Civil War approached Life magazine asked Robert Penn Warren to write an essay on the impact the war had on America. Warren, a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and numerous other prizes accepted. This small book is the essay he wrote in 1961. While Warren never considered himself a historian, he had a lifelong love of history and published a biography on John Brown. His grandfather, who fought for the South while believing in Union, told him about the Civil War and instilled in him a love of history.

This essay is as fresh and new today as it was in 1961. Warren's thoughts on the war, what he calls "The Great Alibi" and the "Treasury of Virtue" are still accurate. This is one of the great essays on the American Civil War, the impact on American history and how it affects us today. The style of writing is interesting, intelligent and very easy to read. You will quickly be caught up in the logic even as you identify current positions and come to understand their historic importance.

2007-10-16 (Tampa Bay area) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 5

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Civil War Established America as a Country.
Robert Penn Warren, a noted Southern writer, is certain that our Civil War shaped modern America, the social institutions which had to take care of the freed slaves, domestic policies, and foreign interests. "The Civil War is our only 'felt' history -- history lived in the national imagination and not just on paper. This is not to say that the War is always, and by all men, felt in the same way. Quite the contrary. But this fact is an index to the very complexity, depth, and fundamental significance of the event. It is an overwhelming and vital image of human, and national, experience."

It taking place so long ago and ended so disastrously with the death of Abraham Lincoln, I really don't believe it caused our failing economy, philosophy, and psychology. Far too many wars, most on foreign lands, have taken place since then to put all the blame on the ressurection of the slaves. "There is no facet of our lives today that does not owe its present character in some measure to the Civil War."

The Confederate Commander in East Tennessee was General James Longstreet. The siege of Knoxville and Battle of Fort Sanders was disastrous for this area. Bridge burners to stop the railroad took place across East Tennessee. The campaign at Strawberry Plains was led by Colonel William P. Sanders, for whom the Fort on the UT campus was named. Bulls Gap, birthplace of Archie Campbell (HeeHaw fame) was pivotal for the northeast, as was Lick Creek Bridge and Blue Springs.

In Middle Tennessee, commandered by Braxton Bragg and John Bell Hood, Nathan Bedford Forrest reigned in Columbia, having been born a short distance away in Chapel Hill; Columbia is the birthplace of a U. S. President, James Polk, Thompson's Station and Fort Donelson on either end of Nashville had important confrontations. In Pulaski, Sam Davis was hanged as a Confederate spy; there is a statue on the Square and on Capitol Hill in Nashville. His home at Smyrna is near Murfreesboro.

West Tennessee was under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest, whom Sherman called, "that devil Forrest." There is a statue of him in Forrest Square on Union Avenue in Memphis. He started his campaign in Clifton on the Tennessee River where the federal ironclad held sway, near Jackson, TN. At Shiloh, one of the nations's oldest and most pristine battlefield parks, General Albert Sidney Johnston led the Southern side and died (buried there 25 miles Northeast of Corinth, Mississippi, near Savannah, Tennessee. The Sons of Confederate Veterans have established a memorial at Salem Cemetery near Jackson and a small park at Davis Bridge, near Bolivar.

Robert Penn Warren was a Phodes Scholar at Oxford University in London and taught at Yale University, as did Richard Marius. He wrote JOHN BROWN: THE MAKING OF A MARTYR, THE CAVE, WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME, BAND OF ANGELS (made into a movie), ALL THE KINGS'S MEN which won the Pulitzer prize and made into an Academy award winning movie about Huey Long. He also wrote PROMISES (poetry, which won the Edna St. Vincent Millay Award of Poetry Society of America), SELECTED ESSAYS, TEXTBOOKS: UNDERSTANDING POETRY and UNDERSTANDING FICTION. He was truly as much a part of history as the Civil War of which he writes his meditation on the Centennial in this book.

2005-09-11 | Betty Burks (Knoxville, TN) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Outstanding
Interesting little book, this. Costs next-to nothing and takes almost no time to read. But there's more here than most of the other spurious profundity published these days.

Warren, a Kentuckian whose grandfather fought for the Confederacy during that war, looks at the effects of the war on both North and South. Warren is harsh on the hypocrisy of the North and its "Treasury of Virtue" as he calls it. But he is no Lost Causer; he is equally harsh with the South, with its "Great Alibi." And Warren is scathing with those racists who believed(and still believe)themselves to be the legatees of Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee. An essential book.

2000-04-03 (Webster Groves, Missouri United States) | Helpful Votes: 23 | Rating: 5

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A miniature classic of historical interpretation
The noted poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren wrote several brilliant book-length essays on various subjects, including JEFFERSON DAVIS GETS HIS CITIZENSHIP BACK (which originally appeared in THE NEW YORKER) and INTEGRATION, but none better than this miniature classic of historical interpretation. In 1961, when LIFE magazine asked him for his thoughts on the centennial of the Civil War, he wrote this superb, thoughtful essay (originally subtitled "A Meditation on the Centennial"). In an extraordinarily compressed discussion, Warren notes a dizzying variety of effects that the war and the policies it brought in its wake had on American society. His two most important observations have to do with the ways that the North and the South used the war as alibis. For the victorious North, the war was a "treasury of virtue" that excused generations of corruption, short-sighted public policy, and neglect of national interests; after all, we won the war and freed the slaves. For the defeated South, the war was "the great alibi" that excused every failure to grapple with a region's pressing social and economic problems. Warren never wrote better than in these eloquent pages; this book should be required reading for anyone interested in the Civil War in particular or American history in general. Its reappearance, with a fine introduction by Howard Jones (author of MUTINY ON THE AMISTAD and other excellent histories of the Civil War era), is cause for celebration. -- Richard B. Bernstein, Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School, and Daniel M. Lyons Visiting Professor in American History, Brooklyn College/CUNY (1997-1998)

1998-06-09 | Helpful Votes: 36 | Rating: 5

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The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren

Description

In this indispensable volume, John Burt has assembled every poem (with the exception of "Brother to Dragons") ever published by Robert Penn Warren, the first Poet Laureate of the United States.

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Customer Reviews

Warren's Poetic Canon: 554
John Burt has provided an extraordinary service to students, teachers, scholars, and readers of Robert Penn Warren's poetry. Among the 554 poems included in this volume are previously uncollected poems and an unpublished poem, "With or Without Compass?" (in the textual notes)--all neatly organized chronologically in versions that are explained logically and thoroughly in the section on emendations and in the textual notes. The Explanatory Notes section adds glosses to words and references that might otherwise be obscure to a younger audience. Well formatted, well thoughtout, well articulated. "The" volume of Warren's poetry to own, to read, and to re-read.

2006-06-22 | Biblio-Bo (Commerce, TX USA) | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 5

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Truly comprehensive volume
I will leave it to others more qualified to sing the praises of Warren's poetry, and will merely add some vital information that is inexplicably left out of the books description above: this volume contains every poem published and unpublished that Warren ever wrote with the exception of his book-length poem "Brother to Dragons." It includes his earliest poems from the "Fugative" at Vanderbilt, the long and wonderful "Audubon: A Vision" and all subsequent books of poetry he published. Further, Warren was an constantly revising his poems, and the editor here includes Warren's final revised versions of the poems. Finally, Harold Bloom's introductory essay is a fabulous overview. In short, if you own this book and "Brother to Dragons" then you have ever word of Warren's poetry and you are set for a lifetime of enjoyment. Buy it.

2005-02-22 | tfn3 (Atlanta, GA USA) | Helpful Votes: 12 | Rating: 5

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Warren's poems are a triumph of the human spirit.
I find most contemporary poetic practice notable only for its miserly concern for the difficulties attendant upon the small, the domestic, the momentary--huge acreages felled only to tell us that someone built a fence in their backyard once, and their husband helped them and the bindweed grew up around it and that was symbolic of relationships enduring and such. I'm therefore ensanguined by Burt's new collection (definitive enough, I should think, to silence the shrieks of Robert Penn Warren harpies), which teaches us that bindweed can't "hold candle to chokeweed," that fences tend "to grow thick with unfencing menses," and that husbands are meaningful only inasmuch as they "lung persevering into the guts of Cromwell." As a result, this collection--under Burt's sprightly editorship --provides a needed corrective; Warren takes an uncompromising view of the suffering subject splayed upon the rack of history, and the results are cheerful and life-affirming. This book made me realize that there's a reason for everything; I will recommend it to my co-workers.

1998-12-10 | Helpful Votes: 14 | Rating: 5

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All the King's Men [2006 Movie Tie-In Edition]

Product Details

• Notes:
• ISBN13: 9780156031042
• Working order: USED - VERY GOOD

Description

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This landmark book is a loosely fictionalized account of Governor Huey Long of Louisiana, one of the nation's most astounding politicians. All the King's Men tells the story of Willie Stark, a southern-fried politician who builds support by appealing to the common man and playing dirty politics with the best of the back-room deal-makers. Though Stark quickly sheds his idealism, his right-hand man, Jack Burden -- who narrates the story -- retains it and proves to be a thorn in the new governor's side. Stark becomes a successful leader, but at a very high price, one that eventually costs him his life. The award-winning book is a play of politics, society and personal affairs, all wrapped in the cloak of history.

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Customer Reviews

TWO masterpieces!!
This review is about the audio version.

I read the hard copy of the book years ago, and I've always remembered it being one of the ten best books I've ever read. Of course, over the years only the basic story remained in my mind as the details faded. So I eagerly began listening to the audio version and quickly rediscovered the beauty of Warren's writing along with his interesting -- and sometimes fascinating -- sub plots. But what made this experience special was Michael Emerson's superb narration. With his multiple voices and his perfect interpretation of the drama, the book comes to life and is an even more exceptional story than I'd remembered.

If only Emerson and Kristoffer Tabori could narrate EVERY book I want to listen to!

2010-03-09 (Texas) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A Beautiful Book that will stay with me Forever
This book sat on my shelf for a couple months before I even opened it. Originally getting it because it was a bargain book on Amazon, I initially didn't think much of it. I attempted reading it twice and wasn't quite ready for it. It took an English professor in college who recommended I read it to get past the first twenty pages. What I first found to be boring pretty language transformed into something transcendent. After completing the novel I found that Robert Penn Warren was the only person in history to receive a Pulitzer in poetry and prose. "All the Kings Men" clearly illustrates Warren's poetic language and imagery. My first mistake with this book was to dismiss it as a "political" novel. While politics is involved and part of the story is set around southern politics, it in no way encompasses the novel. Instead this is novel about life. The story is both alien and deeply personal for the reader. The narrator walks you through his life and introduces you to the people around him. Willie Stark, while an impressive figure in American Literature is more like a supporting character throughout the novel. Instead it's a novel that focus' on the narrator's trials and tribulations. Everything from love, and loss, to past and present and how these things shape our lives. It is perhaps my favorite novel in American Literature. If at first you seem daunted, stop reading and come back to it. A novel that sticks with you, that is Highly Recommended!

2009-09-29 | lover of literature (new jersey) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Our universal confrontation with the impossibility of integrity.
All works of art are only as strong as their underlying structure. In this book the organizing theme is perhaps the most daunting question any of us will ever face: The book is built upon an examination of our universal confrontation with the impossibility of integrity, or moral wholeness, and whether our life remains worth living afterwards.

One character finds it is not. One becomes mad from her unknowing. One believes it doesn't matter, yet dies at the hand of another for whom nothing else matters, and who in turn dies for his belief.

The protagonist and narrator, Jack Burden, is surely one of the most cynical of men, but his 650 page journey through darkness, false enlightenment, and eventually toward a dubious and paradoxical redemption, wet my face many times. Where does this effect come from? Not from the plotting (which is flawless, of course), or the magnificent and dazzling array of characters, and their epic tortures, or the stupefying command of literary craft, technique, and method the author displays, but from the sustained poetic narrative itself, every single word of which is perfectly calibrated to unlock one's deepest feelings, and to change one forever.

2009-08-09 (Madison, WI USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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A Great American Novel
It's doubtful that any book will ever be chosen as The Great American Novel, but those looking for one should certainly try All the King's Men.

I don't read many classics these days, but discovered this one when it was assigned in high school English. Then I had to read it twice to feel like I really had a grip on it. (Yeah, I was that kid.) It was worth it, though, as this is one of the most masterful novels I've ever read.

For starters, Robert Penn Warren is great with language; it will come with no surprise that he was also a poet. Some of the passages in this book demand that you stop and admire his skill with the English language, and that's not something I do often. But his knowledge of language is complemented by a knowledge of the world: this isn't one of those dry classics full of long-winded philosophical musings or descriptions of trees (although the former at least is present), but a fascinating story in its own right. It centers on Jack Burden, the right-hand man to governor Willie Stark, who is based on a 1930's governor of Louisiana, Huey Long. There is a fair bit about politics here, with the focus on demagoguery and the corrupting influence of power much more so than specific political issues. But that is balanced by the story of Jack's life, jumping backward and forward in time; to me that enhances the story rather than confusing it, but I won't deny that this novel requires a great deal of concentration.

The characterization is excellent, and Warren's depiction of human relationships is nothing if not intense. He does a similarly wonderful job evoking various settings. My only criticism is that too many of the characters tend to talk as if they were philosophers or mind-readers (character A can only inform character B of what B thinks, feels or believes so many times before I start to roll my eyes). Still, in a novel this brilliant, that's a minor flaw.

This is a must-read for those interested in classics, and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in American Literature (with a capital L) or who is looking for a challenging book, because believe me, this isn't an easy or quick read. If you're up for it though, it's worth the trouble, because All the King's Men is a true masterpiece.

2009-08-06 (USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Metaphysical or Political?
This is a novel whose prose is astounding on every level. Robert Penn Warren was an immensely talented writer and poet, and he brings these gifts to bear in this wonderful novel. Rarely would I say that a 600+ page novel doesn't have a few words to shave here and there, but I can't say that about All The King's Men. I would not want to be the editor who thought he could whittle down this writer's great work.
ATKM is the story of Jack Burden (metaphor of a name) and his long (too long) growth process. Jack has what we would call "issues", and like most of us he has the ability to overcome them, but first he must grow up. This novel is the story of that process.
ATKM has been called a novel about politics, but I think that politics serves a secondary function in this text. It is through his involvement in the underbelly of the political world that the narrator (Jack) learns how to live in the real one.
Even though there are a multitude of characters in this text, each one is finely wrought and Warren never seems to delve into caricature. With the huge cast of characters in the novel this is no small feat. One of the greatest glories in this text is that there is not a single character who is likable or without flaws. And yet, as I read I found that I really did not hate any of them. In fact, I felt I knew many of them. That is because they are so lovingly and accurately crafted by the author. Jack states towards the novel's close about one of the text's more dastardly characters, Tiny Duffy, "and for the first time I saw him as human." That really is one of the main themes of the text. How all of us, in all of our ugliness and beauty , are still divinely human. When we see the good and ill in others and don`t pass judgment, we can then recognize and accept it in ourselves. Jack Burden is the unique narrator in that his almost passive views of others allows the reader to engage with them without prejudice.
The colloquialisms and speech of the deep south in the early half of the twentieth century are delivered here with the accuracy and the warmth of someone who knew intimately the world which he was writing about. Rarely have I read a novel with such a keen sense and development of time and place.
ATKM also has many subplots and diversions that are complete narratives in themselves, and are satisfying to that end. Yet they all also tie into the larger themes of the novel as a whole.
Read this novel closely, be prepared to reread certain parts, and then sit back and lustfully digest one of the greatest of American novels. You will learn something about yourself along the way.

2009-07-27 (Newark, OH) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Night Rider (Southern Classic Series)

Description

Warren's first novel set in the tobacco wars of Kentucky in the early 20th century.

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Customer Reviews

The Way It Was.
The author of ALL THE KING'S MEN wrote during a time when one could speak his mind and beliefs in an upfront way with dignity without critical interrogation as to his politics, religion, etc. He was not like Huey Long. Robert Penn Warren is a disguished Southern writer, born in Guthrie, Kentucky. Since he graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, we like to claim him as one of us. The first book of his I read was A PLACE TO COME TO. He went on to get degrees from University of California, Yale, and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1930.

He was a most prolific writer, some of the main ones I enjoyed were THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR, JEFFERSON DAVIS GETS HIS CITIZENSHIP BACK, JOHN BROWN: THE MAKING OF A MARTYR, BAND OF ANGELS (a movie was made of this), ALL THE KING'S MEN (won Pulitizer Prize for Fiction) and EYES, ETC.: A MEMOIR. He wrote a famous play called ALL THE KING'S MEN and many volumes of poems, most especially AUDUBON: A VISION, CHIEF JOSEPH OF THE NEZ PERCE, PROMISES (1957, which won the Pulitizer Prize for Poetry) and NOW AND THEN (his third Pulitizer Prize).

In 1944-45, he was the second occupant of the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress. He received numerous other awards for his writing of all sorts, as he continued to be a professor of English. He was one of a special group of Vanderbilt-educated writers, including some well known personages as prolific as he and as well-loved. He did an in-depth study of Melville. He was a controversial figure in his old age, but always the true blue Southern gentleman.

2006-10-24 | Betty Burks (Knoxville, TN) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3

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Night Rider
Percy Munn, a young lawyer and tobacco farmer in Kentucky, becomes a powerful member of The Association - a group of farmers who band together in an effort to break the economic monopoly of the big tobacco companies. It's not an easy fight, and soon The Association is acting like the KKK, coercing farmers into doing their bidding, resorting to violence if necessary. Munn's morals disappear. Warren explores this dilemma of a good man doing bad things for a good cause and the effect it has on his life pretty well. It's a powerful work in spots, especially in Warren's use of dialogue, but finally the story, and the book itself, seems too long and drawn out. A decent first novel, but Warren would do better work later on.

2005-09-06 (South Central PA, USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Flawed first novel, but hints of the better work to come...
Penn Warren ended up with a fine reputation, largely based on "All the King's Men" and poetry and literary criticism and his standing as a "modern" Southerner in the mid-20th century who could explain some of the past sins and virtues of his ancestors and neighbors. This first novel displays promise, but is not a compelling read page-by-page. It improves with each chapter after getting off to a slow start. For my taste, there is excessive Kentucky backwoods dialogue, some uninteresting digressions, and some failure to develop the major characters in ways that make one care deeply about their fates. Percy, the lawyer and main figure, idealistically but with some vanity, jumps into a tobacco growers union which plans to fight the big corporate buyers in order to get a fairer price for the crop. However, little-by-little, the association members begin to become coercive, and then to terrorize, those who won't join. A moral cause has become an immoral enterprise by the end of the book. Lives are taken or ruined, and the acts "justified" because the cause has to be saved due to the energies already invested in it. Meanwhile, Percy commits an act against justice to get a client free of a murder charge, an act against his innocent wife which destroys his marriage, and an act of murder to preserve his cause. He does not seem to know just how he sunk that low, or how to recover. He has an affair after his wife leaves him that seems loveless and even lust-less, yet it leads to tragedy for the father of the girl with whom he sleeps. In some ways the book is a replaying of the lost Confederate cause of the Civil War. I've stated some of its weaknesses, but I must say that I did want to stick it through. I came to care about Percy and wanted to find out how it ended, even though Percy is not fully likeable. There is one earlier review posted on this site, and that writer dissects the novel more skillfully than I can. I agree with his assessment. Worth reading if you have a special interest in Penn Warren, or in Kentucky, or tobacco history, or in how organizations with high-minded goals can be corrupted by forceful leaders or strained circumstances.

2003-12-21 (Midland, Texas USA) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 3

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Sticks with you like resin from tobacco plants
Though it has now been almost 30 years since I last spent a fall afternoon cutting tobacco, spearing the stalks onto wooden staves, and hanging the staves into the curing barn, I still remember the smell of the plants, the stickiness of the resin, the glint of the cutting and spearing tools. This tenuous link to a much earlier time, the time of the tobacco wars that rocked rural Kentucky and Tennessee just before WWII, provided me with just a sliver of insight to the hard times Robert Penn Warren depicts in his first novel, Night Rider.

The protagonist, Percy Munn, is an affable but pliable young lawyer, happily married with a growing law practice when he is drawn into supporting "The Association," an ardent band of tobacco farmers, including doctors, politicians, and other men whom "Perse" admires and who in turn admire him for his oratory skills, leadership, and status. Percy, himself a tobacco farmer, and the association work to break the economic monopoly exerted by the big tobacco companies (those bastards were evil well before they started lying to the public about the addictive nature of their deadly products). But when legal and ethical means are not enough, the collective leadership starts down a slippery slope of coercing nonassociation members to join or else face the consequences. Bands of "night riders" fan out across countryside, first destroying the crops of those who refused their entreaties to join up, then property, until even the taking of human life is justified as a means to their end once they have made the decision to torch the tobacco warehouses in Bardsville and the other towns in the vicinity.

Percy Munn finds himself at the center, and as other men whom he admired peel off from The Association because their moral bearing will not allow their continued participation, Percy eventually finds himself cut off from his wife; men such as Capt. Todd whom he greatly admired; Lucille Christian, the woman who tries to save him from himself; and eventually the leaders of The Association who let him take a fall for something he did not do.

The story is properly characterized as a tragedy even though Percy Munn is not as noble a central figure as one might expect. His great weakness is that he attaches himself to causes without much thought of the consequences. In other words, he is an idealist, but a flawed one. Though Percy's fall is in part caused by his flaws, a series of betrayals---sometimes he is the betrayer and other times he is betrayed---also conspire against him. When loyalty becomes more a currency than a principal, tragedy is inevitable.

Robert Penn Warren captures the speech and mannerisms of this main characters effectively, but he does not develop three-dimensional characters, with the exception of Willie Proudfit, the hard-scrabble, nearly destitute farmer who is something of a mystic who lives life fully and with a fervor Perse cannot experience as he continues his spiral inward. The landscape and settings seem more like those rendered by wood cuttings rather than a photograph. Some of Robert Penn Warren's digressions meander for pages without bolstering the story, and at times the allegorical and naturalistic elements of the novel seem at war with one another.

If permitted, I might rate this novel three and a half stars. Reading Night Rider is a worthwhile book for wintertime reading, butit is not the finest work by the author who was to become the first Poet Laureate of the United States.

2002-02-26 | loce_the_wizard (Lilburn, GA USA) | Helpful Votes: 8 | Rating: 3

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The Cave (Kentucky Voices)

Description

In his sixth novel, The Cave (1959), Robert Penn Warren tells the story of a young man trapped in a cave in fictional Johntown, Tennessee. His predicament becomes the center of national attention as television cameras, promoters, and newscasters converge on the small town to exploit the rescue attempts and the thousands of spectators gathered at the mouth of the cave.

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Customer Reviews

A Character Study
This is a work to be carefully and reflectively read. The story itself is a simple one of a failed rescue attempt from a cavern. The various characters' lives which are written as sidelights to the main story are of what is of interest in the story. Unfortunately, to this reader at any rate, these rich characterazations are all too abruptly abandoned. Each one of these lost characters would be worthy of a novel in themselves. I feel as though the character Dorthy, for an example, is a well-developed character study but eventually is just left hanging. Worse yet, the main protagonist, Isaac, simply runs away. I found this to be most distressing.

2006-07-24 (Riverside, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 4

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Complex Characters, Complex Book, Complex Ideas
Here's a book that is becoming more and more rare... a book about complex people with complex motives. Warren's poetic novel is wonderful to read just for the phrasing at times, but the characters, their history, their thoughts and actions, and their interactions are what really brings this to the top of my short list. It's a book for a book group. So many ideas so close to the surface, without being absolutely thrown in your face. Without giving away the end, I can say that you see much of it coming, but you don't care. You want to read every word to see what Warren has to say about the connections and lack of connections between people.

2003-02-27 (Downers Grove, IL United States) | Helpful Votes: 11 | Rating: 5

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I can't believe this is out of print!
I found this book in a used bookstore and just opened it up and started reading. Something about it got me hooked, and I just keep going. The novel is constructed brilliantly, with Warren providing large backgrounds for all of his charecters in the first 150 or so pages, and then the "experiences" of the different individuals caving in on one another. The end of the novel contains some of the most powerful dialogues scenes I have ever read. I loved this book.

2002-06-16 | Peter Neofotis (New York, NY) | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 5

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The Circus in the Attic: and Other Stories

Description

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Customer Reviews

Warren
Penn Warren offers a unique glimpse of southern culture in the 1940's. This collection is comprehensive and leave you ready for other books.

2007-01-09 (Kansas) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Highly underrated author.
Robert Penn Warren, The Circus in the Attic (Dell, 1947)

The back jacket of the book says, "These stories come from the pen of one of America's half-dozen great writers." Given the time period of the book's release, that was really saying something. Something accurate, but something nonetheless. Penn Warren (who won the Pulitzer two year's before for All the King's Men) wrote the stories in this book over the course of fifteen years. Most were previously published.

The book is framed with two novellas, the title story and "Prime Leaf," with a number of shorter works in between. As with most of Penn Warren's work, the tales are about depression-era and WW2-era life in the American south, people going on about their day-to-day business. A number of the stories deal with the same town, and the same characters pass in and out of them, so the reader gets the feeling of getting to know different aspects of the town as he goes from story to story.

Part of the magic of Penn Warren's work is the ability to simultaneously expose to the reader the quiet dignity of the proletariat and the basic stupidity of human nature. Not an easy thing to make the reader respect the people he's laughing at. But that's exactly what happens time and again in this book. The characters do dumb things for various reasons, but we always understand what those reasons are, and most of the time we can see how the character gets from the reason to the justification to the act without a problem. And while there's always a moral to be had, Robert Penn Warren is certainly not Aesop. The moral is there, waiting to be found, but the reader who's not interested in the morality of the tales is allowed to go off on his merry way and not contemplate the deeper meaning of what's here. That, too, is part of Robert Penn Warren's gift. *** 1/2

2002-03-08 | xterminal (Cleveland, OH) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 3

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Haunting, lovely, and memorable
I have been a fan of Warren's writing for many years. He is known for his novels, yet in many of those the most poignant and moving parts are the inserts, the chapters placed there to highlight the main story. Cass Mastern evokes so much, that it is impossible to imagine AKM without it. Warren achieves much the samee here...while not every story is a masterpiece, at least 2, The Circus in the Attic, and Blackberry Winter, will linger long in the memory. These are stories of a different era, slow, warm, evocative, suggestive and delightful.

2000-05-08 | eanna (Overland Park, KS United States) | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 4

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