Writer Robert Penn Warren Dies : First U.S. Poet Laureate, 84, Had Won 3 Pulitzer Prizes

Robert Penn Warren, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes for fiction and poetry rooted in his native South and the nation’s first poet laureate, died early today at his summer home. He was 84 and had been suffering from cancer.

His wife, the author Eleanor Clark, told a family friend that Warren died in the middle of the night. A local doctor was with him, as well as Clark and their daughter, Rosanna.

“He was one of the truly all-around men who made great contributions in all fields. He was a great poet, fine teacher and did something to revolutionize the modes of teaching literature,” said Cleanth Brooks, who with Warren developed what came to be known as the “New Criticism.”

Born in Guthrie, Ky., on April 24, 1905, Warren grew up hearing tales of the Civil War from his two grandfathers who had been Confederate soldiers, but he lived the last three decades of his life in New England.

Before his second marriage, to Clark, she had suggested that they return to the South so that their children would know his world.

“But I discovered it wasn’t the same world,” Warren once said. “I had been carrying a dream around in my head.”

In the same way, he said that “All the King’s Men” was not about Huey Long, but about the myth of the swaggering populist governor of Louisiana.

The novel, his greatest success in fiction, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 and became an Academy Award-winning motion picture.

Warren was the first winner of Pulitzer Prizes in both poetry and fiction. The poetry prizes came in 1957 for “Promises: Poems 1954-1956,” and in 1979 for “Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978.”

He also was among the first recipients of the MacArthur Foundation’s unrestricted “genius grants.”

He was appointed poet laureate in 1986, assuming a largely ceremonial title that Congress had tacked on to the post of consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress.

“The people who create these posts don’t give a damn about poetry,” Warren said of the appointment. “They do it because it’s a nice thing to do. They think ‘There’s a poet down the road; let’s make him a poet laureate.’ ”

Entering Vanderbilt University in 1921 intending to study science, Warren found that his science teachers were not as good as his English teachers, who included John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson, both members of the “Fugitive Group” of poets in Nashville.

The Fugitives thought of the South as having a distinct regional identity, more rural than urban, politically conservative and bound by blood-kinship, although, Warren stressed, “everybody had his own idea” about what the South was.