The Circus in the Attic and Other Stories

by Robert Penn Warren

A collection of Penn Warren’s best short two novelettes and twelve stories that skillfully handle a variety of themes and styles.”Worth reading for their craftsmanship and variety” (Charles Poore, New York Times).

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, American, Classic Literature, Collections, Literature, Classics

276 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.

Reviews

[Lesle · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Circus in the Attic Bolten, the only child of a weak father and a possessive mother, Bolton as a boy makes several gestures against restrictions such as, riverbank baptismal ceremony and running off with the carnaval. His mother dominates his life. With all his dreams that are so different than his just ok life of a teacher and writer (that is never finished). His childhood dream of a Circus, which he built a tiny scale in his attic with animals and clowns and trapeze artists and a lion tamer, gave him some comfort of what he cherishes, has control, and he understands. The loss of three in his life and the loss of his Circus, as he no longer even has this to comfort him, because he sold the pieces off at auction for the war effort.
Penn gives us a view of the Southern life during the Civil War through WWII and how it was dealt with.

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Circus in the Attic and Other Stories is a collection of stories by Robert Penn Warren. Warren is mostly known for his novel All The King's Men, which won him the Pullitzer Prize.

All of the stories in this book present a colorful picture of Southern Culture from the Post Civil War era to the Depression, both time periods that afflicted the South with profound poverty. Many of his stories focus on individual people inside that climate of poverty and reconstruction, which was occurring in the south. The stories are valuable for that attribute alone.

They are also stories that paint a portrait of a man's dreams and how they are shaped and impacted by his relationship with his family inside his community at specific epochs of time.

All the stories are from the viewpoint of a man who has aspirations that are usually defeated by a domineering mother or wife, often a faithless wife. Because this premise is built into the majority of the stories in this collection one gathers that perhaps they are based on the author's life.

The first story is Circus in the Attic. The protagonist expresses his dreams by secretly creating a tiny model circus in his attic while carrying on his mediocre life as a teacher, movie ticket taker, while writing his "great novel" that is never finished...and also caring for his sickly mother who takes decades to finally pass away.

When she does die, he marries a widow, and when her son goes off to war the man gains some notoriety in giving speeches supporting the war effort. In the end, the son is killed in the war, his wife is killed in a car with another man and our protagonist is left alone. He no longer even has his circus to comfort him because he sold the pieces off at auction for the war effort.

This story is the longest in the book, starting at the Civil War and ending with WWII. Through the years, we see, as the man ages, the Southern landscape changing dramatically as reconstruction and wars make their mark.

The other stories have similar themes, although some deal with poor white people living in the hills, others with towns folk, all from a Southern perspective, allowing the reader to gain insight into how the South survived the devastating effects of a lost war, years of poverty and grew out of the stump, so to speak.

The last story, Prime Leaf is the most frightening because of the evil it exposes in small town politics where not even family members are save from lynch mobs or each other.

If you are interested in the history of the South, plus the good writing of a man expressing his own struggles and heartbreak against personal demons, then you will enjoy reading this book.

[Samantha Matherne]

I only got into page 17 on the title story. Something about the writing wasn’t doing it for me, but I may return to this later.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Penn Warren, The Circus in the Attic (Dell, 1947)

The back jacket of the book says, "These stories come from the pen of one of America's half-dozen great writers." Given the time period of the book's release, that was really saying something. Something accurate, but something nonetheless. Penn Warren (who won the Pulitzer two year's before for All the King's Men) wrote the stories in this book over the course of fifteen years. Most were previously published.

The book is framed with two novellas, the title story and "Prime Leaf," with a number of shorter works in between. As with most of Penn Warren's work, the tales are about depression-era and WW2-era life in the American south, people going on about their day-to-day business. A number of the stories deal with the same town, and the same characters pass in and out of them, so the reader gets the feeling of getting to know different aspects of the town as he goes from story to story.

Part of the magic of Penn Warren's work is the ability to simultaneously expose to the reader the quiet dignity of the proletariat and the basic stupidity of human nature. Not an easy thing to make the reader respect the people he's laughing at. But that's exactly what happens time and again in this book. The characters do dumb things for various reasons, but we always understand what those reasons are, and most of the time we can see how the character gets from the reason to the justification to the act without a problem. And while there's always a moral to be had, Robert Penn Warren is certainly not Aesop. The moral is there, waiting to be found, but the reader who's not interested in the morality of the tales is allowed to go off on his merry way and not contemplate the deeper meaning of what's here. That, too, is part of Robert Penn Warren's gift. *** 1/2

[Drew Norwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

RPW was better-suited for the novel than the short story, but several of these were remarkable, namely The Circus in the Attic, Blackberry Winter, and Goodwood Comes Back.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

"When you are nine years old, what you remember seems forever; for you remember everything and everything is important and stands big and full and fills up time and is so solid that you can walk around and around it like a tree and look at it."

If I were rating the best three stories only, this book would be 4.5 stars. My top three, in order, are . . .
1. "Blackberry Winter"
2. "Prime Leaf"
3. "Goodwood Comes Back"
Like many authors known best for their novels, Warren wrote short stories to support himself while he worked on more serious stuff. In fact, after he won a Pulitzer and no longer had any worries about money, he said he disliked writing short stories because he felt like each time he wrote one, he was sacrificing ideas that could have been better used in poems. Besides the excellent top three, these stories are just fine but not great, with glimmers of brilliance but flaws that bring them down. A lot of the mediocre ones are wrenchingly sad too, so it's hard to recommend the collection as a whole. Each one made me think, but it's the kind of fare that makes me want to take a break from "serious" lit and go back to genre stuff for a while.

[B. R. Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book of short stories was a bit of a surprise, much better than I had anticipated. I enjoyed Robert Penn Warren’s writing and storytelling. I believe all the stories (14 in this collection) were set in the area of western KY & TN & AL. Warren was born in Guthrie, KY and later moved to Clarksville, TN so these stories were set on his home turf. I think I most enjoyed the two longer stories, The Circus in the Attic and Prime Leaf, realistic portrayals of days gone past. Warren is great with language, characters and description of setting. He’s certainly not sentimental. I felt transported back in time to early 20th century Mid-South America. Most of the stories set in small towns or in the country. Prime Leaf introduced me to the tobacco wars of 100 plus yrs ago, a subject I knew nothing about. Highly recommend. 4 star plus.

[MJ Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a huge fan of southern lit and this collection of short stories did not disappoint. I read it based on hearing that William Gay stated Blackberry Winter is the greatest short story ever written. Surprisingly enough I enjoyed others better but that was a good story none the less. I feel as though most fans of southern literature would enjoy this. Stand outs were: A circus in the Attic, Christmas Gift, Greenwood Comes Back, The Patented Gate, A Christian Education, The Love of Elsie Barton, Brother Grimes, and Prime Leaf.

[LOU · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came across this book forty years ago quite by chance in a pile of discontinued library books. I read it over a few days and the images and poetry of the stories have stayed with me. I found the stories touching if often acerbic commentaries on human ways and foibles. An underrated masterpiece.

[behsforensics]

Look at Blackberry Winter
Warren, Robert Penn

[Djrmel · Rating 4 out of 5]

An alternate title for this book could be "The Funeral in the Basement" or something along those lines, because at the heart of every one of these stories is death and saying goodbye. In my mind, that makes for good reading, especially when the stories are told by an author as unsympathetic to his characters as Robert Penn Warren is. By far, my favorite new-to-me story of this book was "The Patented Gate and The Mean Hamburger", probably the closest Warren ever got to writing humor, but of course, it's dark humor. "A Christian Education" I've read before in several short story anthologies, and it is a story that holds up to being read over and over again. Many of these stories focus on tobacco farmers, set in a time when tobacco growing was an honorable and honest way to make a living. It's become politically incorrect to remember that time, making this collection of stories historically important as well as great reading. My only negative goes along with the almost always true bit of writer's advice: never write in dialect. As great as a writer as Warren is, his attempt to use dialog to create setting is jarring, and when that happens in the first story of a collection, it jumps out in every other story that follows.

[Jeff Hobbs]

Read so far:

*The circus in the attic--
Blackberry winter--3
*When the light gets green--
Christmas gift--2
*Goodwood comes back--
The patented gate and the mean hamburger--3
A Christian education--
The love of Elsie Barton: a chronicle--
Testament of flood--
The confession of Brother Grimes--
Her own people--
*The life and work of Professor Roy Millen--
*The unvexed isles--
*Prime leaf--
***
*Cass Mastern's wedding ring --
*Statement of Ashby Wyndham --
*Meet me in the green glen --
*Have you seen Sukie? --
*I am dreaming of a white Christmas: The natural history of a vision --
*How Willie Proudfit came home --

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixed bag, which makes sense since it was just something cobbled together in the wake of All the King's Men's success, and these stories were never written with a coherent collection in mind. I like the novellas at either end of the book best, which suggests to me that Warren gets better as his canvas grows larger. Some of the smaller stories, little more than vignettes, didn't work for me. They seemed like writerly experiments more than fully-realized pieces. I did like these, though: "Goodwood Comes Back," "The Patented Gate," "A Christian Education," and "Testament of Flood."

[Gaba · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm done with this one... I couldn't get the point of each story, and only got to the third one.
The writing is beautiful, the author does not lose any description, but he tells about a lot of characters, and while you're trying to figure out what the story is about ...he concludes with something like "that's the way it is and it doesn't matter ", I mean I felt like "then, why are you telling me this?". I finally got bored. Maybe another time.

[Kimb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this entirely on an airplane. So it was interesting. The short stories were really engaging. The had the strangest endings, and sometimes no real ending. Many of the stories take place in the same town and use the same characters which helped tie it all together a bit more.

[Jeana · Rating 4 out of 5]

rather dark little stories; very enjoyable

[Lee Churchill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard at first, you eventually find yourself gathering dust along side the eccentrically carved tales and circus animals.

[Tamcat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome! Great short stories I will read again & again.