Robert Penn Warren Stamp, A Reminder

It was mere coincidence when I discovered that the Robert Penn Warren stamp was out. I cowboyed down to the local post office to mail a package and, while waiting in line, was offered chocolate by the friendly postal worker. (Some people call them bureaucrats; not I).

After pricing my package, she asked the obligatory question: "Need any stamps today?"

"Hmmm," I said. "Got anything interesting?"

She filed through the new stamps and pulled out some sheets of Ronald Reagan, what appeared to by Disney characters, then Robert Penn Warren. Somehow I doubt she expected to sell many of those in this red state suburban asphalt jungle. She was quite surprised to find out who Robert Penn Warren was, a great liberal southern writer who was there for the early days of the Civil Rights movement and the environmental movement.

The average TV viewer today has most likely heard of Mark Twain, even William Faulkner. But Warren, while as important, was a bit too high on the intellectual end of letters to penetrate down to this level.

As the editor-in-chief of The Southerner magazine a few years ago, we honored Mr. Warren with a special issue of original fiction. Here is an excerpt from my editor's note.

Warren is the only writer in American history to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and poetry. He graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University in 1925, the year of the "Scopes Monkey Trial" in Rhea County, Tenn. He studied at Berkeley, Yale and Oxford. Beginning in 1930, he was published in I'll Take My Stand, the manifesto of Southern Literary Agrarianism, and later founded and edited The Southern Review, an influential literary journal from which we at The Southerner take a certain progressive tradition. All The Kings Men, his most memorable work, is arguably the best Southern novel ever. I reread the introduction on occasion to remind myself how to root a story in the land and place, and to recall the way our region was stripped of its trees in the first half of this century.

My favorite Warren passage, from page 2 and 3 of All The King's Men:

There were pine forests here a long time ago but they are gone. The bastards got in here and set up the mills and laid the narrow-gauge tracks and knocked together the company commissaries and paid a dollar a day and folks swarmed out of the brush for the dollar . . . . The saws sang soprano and the clerk in the commissary passed out the blackstrap molasses and the sowbelly and wrote in his big book, and the Yankee dollar and Confederate dumbness collaborated to heal the wounds of four years of fratricidal strife, and all was merry as a marriage bell. Till, all of a sudden, there weren't any more pine trees. They stripped the mills. The narrow-gauge tracks got covered with grass. Folks tore down the commissaries for kindling wood. There wasn't any more dollar a day. The big boys were gone, with diamond rings on their fingers and broadcloth on their backs. But a good many stayed right on, and watched the gullies eat deeper into the red clay. . . .
- Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men, 1946, pages 2-3.

I mailed a letter to Harper's magazine pitching a story about it. I wonder if they read their snail mail?