Cleanth Brooks; Critic Championed Southern Writers

Cleanth Brooks, 87, literary critic and author who championed Southern writers. From 1935 until 1942, Brooks and the late poet Robert Penn Warren published “Southern Review,” which was considered one of the nation’s most distinguished literary journals. With it they provided an early forum for such Southern writers as Randall Jarrell, Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter. A Yale University faculty member from 1947 to 1975, Brooks collaborated with Warren on two highly influential textbooks, “Understanding Poetry” in 1938 and “Understanding Fiction” in 1943. Brooks’ other books included “The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry” in 1947 and “William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country” in 1963. Brooks won a prestigious appointment as Yale’s Jefferson Lecturer of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1985. On Tuesday in New Haven, Conn.