Werner's Reviews > All the King's Men

Kentucky-born 20th-century American writer and major academic literary critic Robert Penn Warren is still the only writer ever to have won the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction (for this 1946 novel) and poetry. Both a graduate of, and later a teacher at, Vanderbilt Univ. in Nashville, in the 1930s he was a part of the Southern Agrarians, a circle of Southern literary intellectuals centered around that university, and was one of the contributors, along with others in the group, to its 1930 manifesto of anti-capitalist conservatism, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (which I've never read, but hope to eventually). Back in 1971, having learned about this group and having my interest piqued from reading The Conservative Tradition in America, I chose this novel for my book report in American Literature II as a college freshman. Although more than 50 years have elapsed since then, and I don't have a copy in front of me, I still recall it vividly enough to do it justice, in the sort of informal review that we ordinary readers share with each other here.

I've shelved this as "political fiction" (that is, fiction which is set in the world of politics). Set in 1930s Louisiana (he also taught for a time at Louisiana State Univ., so he was familiar with the life and culture of the state, including its politics), the book takes as its titular "King" a fictional governor of the state, Willie Stark. Aspects of Stark's personality and career are recognizably modeled on real-life Louisiana politician Huey "Kingfish" Long (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long ). However, Stark is not a carbon-copy clone of Long, and not the protagonist of the novel, though he's a major character. The actual protagonist, and maker of the central moral decisions here, is his young press agent, Jack Burden. But political programs and ideology as such aren't Warren's focus here. Rather, his major concerns are moral, philosophical, and even spiritual.

To the extent that there is a message about politics here, it's in keeping with those concerns. Willie Stark began his political career as an honest idealist who wanted to serve the interests of the people of his state. The seduction of power molded him into a corrupt demagogue who's only serving himself. Warren's not as interested in evaluating Stark's political program as in evaluating what his quest for power, and his rationalizations of all the shady machinations and mistreatments of other people that are part of that quest, is doing and has done to him as a person, and what it's doing to his henchmen -and to warn us that this sort of temptation is endemic in political life. But more broadly, he's also posing the questions of what matters most in life, whether right and wrong are real moral categories, and whether it's possible for a person to alter the direction of his/her life for the better. How Jack Burden will ultimately answer those questions is what the reader wants to find out. And while Warren wasn't necessarily a professing Christian, one of his characters here is a preacher who exercises some influence on Jack, and whose message is treated positively.

Racial relations aren't a focus here; they're touched on only peripherally. But Jack and some other characters at times use the n-word casually (which, sadly, did reflect realistic speech in that time and place), and there's also a passing narrative reference to black laborers as "darkies." This is obviously offensive to most readers, including me. Warren can be fairly criticized for this, and for the fact that the essay he contributed to the I'll Take My Stand collection was a defense of the noxious policies of racial segregation that prevailed in the Jim Crow South of that day. But my evaluation of the book overall recognizes positives that counterbalance the racial insensitivity. And to Warren's credit, he did rethink his attitude toward blacks, finally decisively repudiating segregation in a landmark Life magazine article in 1956, and went on to be a strong voice for racial integration and reconciliation. (In that respect, I would say that rather than rejecting his paleo-conservative beliefs, he became a more consistent exponent of their biblical roots.)