Pulitzer Prize Recipient Author. His most famous work is the novel "All the King's Men," which was based on the life of Huey Long, who received much notoriety as the 40th governor of the State of Louisiana. For this novel, he received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize. He published ten novels and sixteen volumes of poetry. He received the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for "Promises: Poems, 1954-1956" and received again in 1978 for "Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978." He is the only author to receive the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and poetry. Born one of three children, his father was a banker and his mother a school teacher. In 1921 he had to have his left eye removed as the result of an accident with his brother, which cancelled his appointment to the United States Naval Academy. That summer, he published in "The Messkit" his first poem "Prophecy." After graduating from a private high school at age 15, his mother enrolled him in a public high school for a year as she thought he was too young to go to college. In the fall of 1921 at age 16, he entered Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, graduating in the summer of 1925 summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and Founder's Medalist. The fall of 1925, he entered the University of California as a graduate student and teaching assistant, and upon graduation in 1927, he entered Yale University on fellowship. In October, 1928 he entered New College at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar receiving his B.Litt. in the spring of 1930. He taught at Vanderbilt University, Southwestern College in Memphis, University of Minnesota, Yale University, and Louisiana State University. He co-founded the literary quarterly, "The Southern Review." In 1938 he published his first novel, "Night Rider," which was about the Kentucky tobacco war at the turn of the 20th century. His last novel was partially autobiographical, "A Place to Come To," in 1977. Two novels were adapted to films, "All the King's Men" in 2006 and "Band of Angels" in 1957. He was appointed as the United States' first Poet Laureate on February 26, 1986. Besides his Pulitzer Prizes, he received a host of awards and honors including the MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981, the Gold Medal for Poetry in 1985, the President Medal of Freedom in 1980 from President Jimmy Carter, and in 1974 the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, the Jefferson Lecturer. Besides novels and poetry, he published a book of short stories, two selections of critical essays, a biography, three historical essays, a study of Melville, a critical book on Dreiser, a study of Whittier, and two studies of race relations in America. He secretly married Emma Brescia in the summer of 1929, a marriage that was to end on June 28, 1951. On December 7, 1952, he married author, Eleanor Clark Warren. This marriage produced two children. After his death, he was buried at Willis Cemetery in Stratton, Vermont, and, at his request, a cenotaph marker was placed in the Warren family plot at Highland Cemetery in Guthrie, Kentucky.