Robert Penn Warren:
April 24, 1905- Sept. 15, 1989

Have a whiskey, neat, today in honor of poet, novelist and literary critic Robert Penn Warren, who twice won the Pulitzer for his poetry and also won for his novel All the King's Men, and who was born on this day in 1905 in Guthrie, Kentucky.  Warren claimed he never meant for King's Men, about a Huey Long-like character named Willie Stark and his right-hand political operative, the former newspaper columnist Jack Burden, to be a "political novel," but perhaps the novel, with its poetic tone and philosophical bent, is a case of the "personal is political."

A member of the Fugitives poet group as well as the Southern Agrarians and a contributor to that group's famous "I'll Take My Stand," Warren was teaching at Louisiana State University during the years of Huey Long's rise and assassination. 

"Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South," Warren once said.  "They're inexpensive and easy to procure."