This volume of personal correspondence takes Warren from the awkwardness of an emerging genius during his fugitive student years at Vanderbilt to the brink of producing great work in a newly appointed post at Louisiana State University.

Continuing where Volume One of the Selected Letters left off, the missives from Warren's Baton Rouge years show the young author exploring and testing the boundaries of his genius on a number of simultaneous fronts. Editing the Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks (a colleague on the English faculty at Louisiana State University) was the centre of his working life and it offered an almost immediate springboard to prominence on both sides of the Atlantic. He also attended to his own writing and not only emerged as a celebrated poet with the publication of Thirty-six Poems in 1936 and Eleven...

First published in 1956, "Segregation" is a collection of Robert Penn Warren's informal conversations with southerners in the wake of the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision. Warren, who in his own writings often explored the theme of race in American life, traveled through his native region to talk with scores of individuals--taxi drivers, NAACP leaders, members of White Citizens groups, college students, preachers--to report their responses to the Court's decision.