He attended Hale High School and received additional training in Latin; he would later consider this instruction responsible for his classical major at college.
As a senior he dabbled in writing poetry and criticism and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa; at his commencement, he was class poet.
In the fall of 1922, Warren entered the Graduate College of Princeton University where he received a Ph.D. in 1926 for his doctoral dissertation, titled Pope as Literary Critic, under the direction of Robert Wilbur Root.
While he was a graduate student at Princeton, Warren cofounded St. Peter's School of Liberal and Humane Studies with Benny Bissell, a fellow young academic, and served as dean for two weeks during each summer until 1931.
Warren made the acquaintances of T. S. Eliot and Evelyn Underhill before returning to Boston University in the fall of 1931, where he became a Professor of English before his departure in 1939.
"[8] With René Wellek, Warren authored the landmark classic Theory of Literature in 1944–46, an influential and comprehensive analysis of the American New Criticism movement.
According to Wellek, the work was written with the idea between Warren and himself that "we should rather combine our forces to produce a book which would formulate a theory of literature with an emphasis on the aesthetic fact which cannot be divorced from evaluation and hence from criticism.
"[9] Wellek contributed insights he acquired from his familiarities with Russian formalism, the Prague Linguistic Circle, the phenomenology of Roman Ingarden, and the movements of German Geistesgeschichte and stylistics.
Harcourt, Brace and Company published Theory of Literature in December 1948 with an imprint of 1949, and by 1976, at the time of the publication of the celebratory collection Teacher & Critic: Essays by and about Austin Warren, it had been translated into eighteen languages (Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, German, Portuguese, Hebrew, Danish, Serbocroat, modern Greek, Swedish, Rumanian, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, French, and Hungarian, in order).
[10] Since its publication, Terence B. Spencer, a former director of the Shakespeare Institute at University of Birmingham, has testified that it "broke our [English] resistance to literary concepts and woke us from our lethargy.