Extollager
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2010
- Messages
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Warren published a much-revised version of this 1953 book (above) in 1979. I've never read anything by Warren to speak of* -- none of his novels, such as All the King's Men -- but I was intrigued when I saw that C. S. Lewis liked Brother so much that he wrote a fan letter. The only other creative (non-scholarly, etc.) books about which he wrote unsolicited fan letters, so far as I remember off-hand, were one of Charles Williams's strange novels (The Place of the Lion), Mervyn Peake's first two Gormenghast books, and John Buchan's Witch Wood, although I think he may have fired off fan letters about one or more other sf or fantasy novels.
This Warren book isn't sf or fantasy. Here's a blurb --
----"This is Robert Penn Warren's best book. . . . Cruel sometimes, crude sometimes, obsessed sometimes, the book is always extraordinary: it does know, and knows sadly and tenderly, even. It is, in short, an event, a great one."-Randall Jarrell, New York Times Book Review [for the original edition, I believe] The significantly revised version of Brother to Dragons appeared in 1979, twenty-six years after the original. It is, Warren wrote, "in some important senses, a new work."
Told in the distinct voices of characters long dead and now gathered at an unspecified place and time, this long poem recalls events leading to and resulting from the 1811 murder of a young slave by Thomas Jefferson's nephew. "R.P.W." is the narrator of the tale, whose poignant ending brings not only reconciliation among the ghostly figures but healing for Warren's persona as well.-----
I believe Flannery O'Connor was a fan too. OK, so I bought it.
*I do remember an essay he wrote on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a poem of "pure imagination."
