In the fall of 1921, at age 16, he entered Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, graduating in the summer of 1925 summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and Founder's Medalist.

He contributed "The Briar Patch" to the Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand along with 11 other Southern writers and poets (including fellow Vanderbilt poet/critics John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson).

[4] However, Warren recanted these views in an article on the civil rights movement, "Divided South Searches Its Soul", which appeared in the July 9, 1956 issue of Life magazine.

A month later, Warren published an expanded version of the article as a small book titled Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South.

In 1965, he published Who Speaks for the Negro?, a collection of interviews with black civil rights leaders including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., thus further distinguishing his political leanings from the more conservative philosophies associated with fellow Agrarians such as Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and particularly Davidson.

Warren's interviews with civil rights leaders are at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky.

It was followed by other similarly co-authored textbooks, including Understanding Fiction, which was praised by Southern Gothic and Roman Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor, and Modern Rhetoric, which adopted what can be called a New Critical perspective.

He is buried at Stratton, Vermont, and, at his request, a memorial marker is situated in the Warren family gravesite in Guthrie, Kentucky.

[17][18][19] In April 2005, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp to mark the 100th anniversary of Warren's birth.

Introduced at the post office in his native Guthrie, it depicts the author as he appeared in a 1948 photograph, with a background scene of a political rally designed to evoke the setting of All the King's Men.

Vanderbilt University houses the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, which is sponsored by the College of Arts and Science.