Warren’s Criticism and the Evolving Self

Dick Cavett’s 1978 interview with Robert Penn Warren, widely televised in two parts, hardly revealed Cavett at his best, though Warren nevertheless rose to the occasion and furnished worthy, if at times facetious, responses to even the most ill-formulated questions. Here, for example, is Warren on his sometime role as literary critic:

I write a lot of criticism, and I’ve done some teaching, which is a form of criticism, but I don’t feel that is a profession. I feel that is part of my social life, talking about books I have read to somebody, or writing about them, and usually the books that I’ve written . . . sort of come out of talking, out of classes. And I got interested in it [the subject] and studied a little harder and wrote the little book.