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.

Warren began teaching at Boston University's College of Practical Arts and Letters in 1926. In 1930 he left Boston to study for a year in London on a fellowship founded by the American Council of Learned Societies. He worked part-time at the British Museum and made progress on the works he later published as Richard Crashaw: A Study in the Baroque Sensibility and Alexander Pope as Critic and Humanist. Warren made the acquaintances of T. S. Eliot and Evelyn Underhill before returning to Boston University in the fall of 1931, where he became a Professor of English before his departure in 1939.

In 1939 Warren joined the English Department of the University of Iowa to teach criticism and the history of criticism. He married Eleanor Blake on September 13, 1941, and soon met René Wellek, with whom he collaborated on Theory of Literature from 1944 to 1946, though Eleanor Blake's death in January 1946 interfered with the book's production schedule. He befriended Allen Tate in 1947 before leaving for the University of Michigan in the fall of 1948.

Warren taught at the University of Michigan for twenty years. During this period he was Fellow of the Kenyon School of English during the summers of 1948-1950, a Senior Fellow of Indiana University's School of Letters from 1950 to 1964 and New York University's Berg Visiting Professor of English from 1953 to 1954. In 1951 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. On September 5, 1959, he married Antonia Degen Keese. Warren retired from the University of Michigan in 1968. He was known for his then-revolutionary abandonment of the formal lecture.