Austin Warren

Austin Warren (July 4, 1899 – August 20, 1986) was an American literary critic, author, and professor of English.

Edward Austin Warren Jr. was born in Waltham, Massachusetts on July 4, 1899 as the elder of two sons by Edward Austin Warren, city alderman of Waltham and expert butcher, and Nellie Myra Anderson Warren. He attended public grammar school in Ashburnham, Massachusetts and briefly attended Waltham High School, where he received instruction in Latin and studied Esperanto independently. At the age of thirteen, Warren and his family relocated to a lonely farm in Stow, Massachusetts. He attended Hale High School and received additional training in Latin; he would later consider this instruction responsible for his classical major at college.

Warren entered Wesleyan University unenthusiastically in the fall of 1916. There he discovered the works of Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and Emanuel Swedenborg. As a senior he dabbled in writing poetry and criticism and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa; at his commencement, he was class poet. He graduated with a major in Latin and a minor in English.

Warren entered the Graduate School of Harvard University in the fall of 1921. There he studied Romanticism with Irving Babbitt, whom he admired greatly. In the fall of 1922, Warren entered the Graduate College of Princeton University where he received a Ph.D. in 1926 for his doctoral dissertation, titled Pope as Literary Critic, under the direction of Robert Wilbur Root.

When Warren was 21 years old the University of Kentucky hired him as an instructor of English. After his year at Harvard, he taught at the University of Minnesota. While he was a graduate student at Princeton, Warren cofounded St. Peter's School of Liberal and Humane Studies with Benny Bissell, a fellow young academic, and served as dean for two weeks during each summer until 1931.

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