Penn Warren on Hemingway

American novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren, author of All the King's Men and the only American writer to win Pulitzer prizes in both fiction and poetry, says that Hemingway's story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" has a religious dimension, and that the old man who has attempted suicide suffers from the despair of atheism: "The despair beyond plenty of money, the despair that makes a sleeplessness beyond insomnia, is the despair felt by a man who hungers for the sense of order and asssurance that men seem to find in religious faith, but who cannot find grounds for his faith."