Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back

Robert Penn Warren

Apr 2014 · University Press of Kentucky

About this ebook

In 1979 Robert Penn Warren returned to his native Todd Country, Kentucky, to attend ceremonies in honor of another native son, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, whose United States citizenship had just been restored, ninety years after his death, by a special act of Congress. From that nostalgic journey grew this reflective essay on the tragic career of Jefferson Davis—"not a modern man in any sense of the word but a conservative called to manage what was, in one sense, a revolution." Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back is also a meditation by one of our most respected men of letters on the ironies of American history and the paradoxes of the modern South.

About the author

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), born in Guthrie, Kentucky, was one of America's most revered writers, producing fiction, poetry, history, and criticism, much of it focusing on the moral dilemmas of the South. He served as America's first poet laureate. He received the Pulitzer Prize three times, for his novel All the King's Men and for his books of poetry Promises: Poems 1954–1956 and Now and Then. He is also the author of Portrait of a Father and The Cave.