Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1996.
The Southern Agrarians were twelve American Southerners who wrote an agrarian literary manifesto in 1930. They and their essay collection, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, contributed to the Southern Renaissance, the reinvigoration of Southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s. They were based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. John Crowe Ransom was their unofficial leader, though Robert Penn Warren became their most prominent member. The membership overlaps with The Fugitives.
Donald Grady Davidson was an American poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and author. An English professor at Vanderbilt University from 1920 to 1965, he was a founding member of the Fugitives and the overlapping group Southern Agrarians, two literary groups based in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a supporter of segregation in the United States.
John Orley Allen Tate, known professionally as Allen Tate, was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and poet laureate from 1943 to 1944. Among his best known works are the poems "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1928) and "The Mediterranean" (1933), and his only novel The Fathers (1938). He is associated with New Criticism, the Fugitives and the Southern Agrarians.
Carson McCullers was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town of the Southern United States. Her other novels have similar themes and most are set in the Deep South.
Southern United States literature consists of American literature written about the Southern United States or by writers from the region. Literature written about the American South first began during the colonial era, and developed significantly during and after the period of slavery in the United States. Traditional historiography of Southern United States literature emphasized a unifying history of the region; the significance of family in the South's culture, a sense of community and the role of the individual, justice, the dominance of Christianity and the positive and negative impacts of religion, racial tensions, social class and the usage of local dialects. However, in recent decades, the scholarship of the New Southern Studies has decentralized these conventional tropes in favor of a more geographically, politically, and ideologically expansive "South" or "Souths".
George Palmer Garrett was an American poet and novelist. He was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2002 to 2004. His novels include The Finished Man, Double Vision, and the Elizabethan Trilogy, composed of Death of the Fox, The Succession, and Entered from the Sun. He worked as a book reviewer and screenwriter, and taught at Cambridge University and, for many years, at the University of Virginia. He is the subject of critical books by R. H. W. Dillard, Casey Clabough, and Irving Malin.
Albert James Young was an American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and professor. He was named Poet Laureate of California by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from 2005 to 2008. Young's many books included novels, collections of poetry, essays, and memoirs. His work appeared in literary journals and magazines including Paris Review, Ploughshares, Essence, The New York Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature, Chelsea, Rolling Stone, Gathering of the Tribes, and in anthologies including the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and the Oxford Anthology of African American Literature.
Denise Giardina is an American novelist. Her book Storming Heaven was a Discovery Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and received the 1987 W. D. Weatherford Award for the best published work about the Appalachian South. The Unquiet Earth received an American Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award for fiction. Her 1998 novel Saints and Villains was awarded the Boston Book Review fiction prize and was semifinalist for the International Dublin Literary Award. Giardina is an ordained Episcopal Church deacon, a community activist, and a former candidate for governor of West Virginia.
Moira Crone is an American fiction author. She was born and raised in Goldsboro, in the tobacco country in eastern North Carolina. She is the author of three collections of short fiction and two novels. Her short stories have been classified as "Southern Gnostic", and as exemplifying the spirit of the New South. Her work has been compared to Flannery O'Connor's for its spiritual overtones and to Sherwood Anderson's for its depiction of small-town life and characters. She taught fiction writing at Louisiana State University, where she served for a number of years as Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and is now Professor Emerita. She also worked as fiction editor for the University Press of Mississippi. Her works have been chosen for the "Year's Best" by the award anthology New Stories From The South five times. In 2009, she was awarded the Robert Penn Warren Award in Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers in recognition of her body of work. In the citation, Allan Gurganus wrote, "Moira Crone is a fable maker with a musical ear, a plenitude of nerve, and epic heart." Moira Crone lives in New Orleans. She is married to poet and author Rodger Kamenetz and has two daughters, author Anya Kamenetz and Kezia Kamenetz.
Hugh Roger McDonald is an Australian author of several novels and a number of non-fiction works. He is also an accomplished poet and TV scriptwriter.
The Yearling is a novel by American writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, published in March 1938. It was the main selection of the Book of the Month Club in April 1938. It won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel.
Guy Owen was a professor of English who produced many different types of literary works.
Margaret Murphy is a British crime writer.
Sheila Kay Adams is an American storyteller, author, and musician from the Sodom Laurel community in Madison County, North Carolina.
Anthony Kellman is a Barbados-born poet, novelist, and musician.
Davidson Garrett, also known as King Lear of the Taxi, is an American poet and actor living in New York City, New York. He drove a New York City yellow taxi cab from 1978 until 2018 to supplement his acting and writing career. Garrett has authored six books of poetry, and has been published in many literary magazines, and poetry reviews.
Songs From the Gypsy is the sixth album by Minneapolis Celtic rock band Boiled in Lead, and its second with lead singer/guitarist Adam Stemple. It is a song cycle based on a Hungarian folk tale, written largely by Stemple and his Cats Laughing bandmate Steven Brust several years prior to Boiled in Lead's recording. Brust, who is best known as a fantasy novelist, collaborated with writer Megan Lindholm on a novel, The Gypsy, based on the songs. Boiled in Lead's album is considered the soundtrack to the novel. Brust had previously co-written two songs on Boiled in Lead's 1994 album Antler Dance, and had released a 1993 solo album, A Rose for Iconoclastes.
