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.

The Southern Review is a quarterly literary magazine that was established by Robert Penn Warren in 1935 at the behest of Charles W. Pipkin and funded by Huey Long as a part of his investment in Louisiana State University. It publishes fiction, poetry, critical essays, and excerpts from novels in progress by established and emerging writers and includes reproductions of visual art. The Southern Review continues to follow Warren's articulation of the mission when he said that it gives "writers decent company between the covers, and [concentrates] editorial authority sufficiently for the journal to have its own distinctive character and quality".