Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky to Robert Warren and Anna Penn. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1925 and the University of California, Berkeley, in 1926. Warren later attended Yale University and obtained his B. Litt. as a Rhodes Scholar from New College, Oxford, in England in 1930. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Italy during the rule of Benito Mussolini. That same year (now, pay attention) he began his teaching career at Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis, Tennessee, just three hog calls and a yodel from Holly Springs, where the one who put this together lives.

While still an undergraduate at Vanderbilt, Warren became associated with the group of poets there known as the Fugitives, and somewhat later, during the early 1930s, Warren and some of the same writers formed a group known as the Southern Agrarians. 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). In 'The Briar Patch the young Warren defends racial segregation, in line with the traditionalist conservative political leanings of the Agrarian group, although Davidson deemed Warren's stances in the essay so progressive that he argued for excluding it from the collection.

However, Warren recanted these views in the 1950's by writing an article in Life magazine on the Civil Rights Movement and adopted a high profile as a supporter of racial integration. He also published 'Who Speaks for the Negro', a collection of interviews with black civil rights leaders including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in 1965, 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'.