English Professor's Work to be Published

Dr. James Perkins, Westminster College professor of English, is co-editor of Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren, Vol. 4: New Beginnings and New Directions, 1953-1968 to be published in May by Louisiana State University Press.

This volume, under the general editorship of Dr. William Bedford Clark of Texas A & M University, covers a period of momentous change in Warren's personal and professional life: he published three books and a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of lyric poetry; moved to Yale University; and married his second wife, Eleanor, with whom he had two children.

Warren's letters chronicle his thoughts on his family, his work, his friends, the state of literary studies, and the culture at large. The recipients include Ralph Ellison, Allen Tate, Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, Eudora Welty, and Louis Rubin.

Perkins's colleague and co-editor, Dr. Randy Hendricks, is a professor of English at the University of West Georgia. Perkins and Hendricks also edited volume three of Warren's letters and For the Record: A Robert Drake Reader.

Perkins, who has been with Westminster College since 1973, earned an undergraduate degree from Centre College, a master's from Miami University, and Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee. During the fall term of 1998, he was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at Seoul National University in Korea. Perkins earned the 2006 Westminster College Distinguished Faculty Award and was previously honored as a Henderson Lecturer and a McCandless Fellow. His publications include: The Cass Mastern Material: The Core of Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men"; Snakes, Butterbeans, and the Discovery of Electricity, a short story collection; and Southern Writers at Century's End, co-edited with Jeffrey J. Folks.

Contact Perkins at (724) 946-7347 or e-mail jperkins@westminster.edu for additional information.