The 100 best novels: No 67 – All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
A compelling story of personal and political corruption, set in the 1930s in the American south
Robert McCrum
Monday 29 December 2014
Robert Penn Warren was a southern poet and novelist, the only writer to win Pulitzer prizes for both his fiction and his poetry. In 1986, he was appointed America’s poet laureate.
All the King’s Men is one of American literature’s definitive political novels, as well as a profound study of human fallibility in politics. Set in the 1930s, it describes the dramatic rise to power, as state governor, of Willie Stark, a one-time radical attorney.
The novel is narrated by Jack Burden, a political reporter who comes to work as the governor’s most trusted aide. The passage of Stark’s career is interwoven with Burden’s life story and philosophical reflections. As he says: “This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story, too. It is the story of a man who lived in the world, and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way.”
Stark, or “the Boss”, is shown becoming transformed from an idealistic lawyer into a powerful state governor, who quickly adopts all kinds of corruption to build a political machine rooted in graft and intimidation.
Stark’s politics earn him many enemies, but his constituents love his fiery, populist manner. The governor is surrounded by a typical southern political gallery of allies and thugs, as well as Burden, who had turned his back on his genteel upbringing to become Stark’s amanuensis.In the process, Burden betrays both his ideals and his career as a historian, and loses the love of his life, Anne Stanton, the daughter of a former state governor.
All the King’s Men has a complex narrative structure: events are described out of sequence to demonstrate the relationship between the past and the present. By showing how and why the characters developed as they did, and how events were shaped, the novel gives the reader the means by which to measure the characters and the events they shape.
Robert Penn Warren’s great novel is at once a political tragedy, a study of individual corruption, and a compelling southern drama with a long afterlife. In Primary Colors, by “Anonymous” (1996), homage is paid to its influence in the character of Governor Stanton.
A note on the text
All the King’s Men, the novel, began life in 1936 as a verse play entitled Proud Flesh. One of the characters in Proud Flesh was named Willie Talos, referring to the brutal character Talus in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
All the King’s Men was published in 1946, in a 464-page hardcover edition from the New York imprint Harcourt Brace & Company, and took its immediate title from the children’s nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. Among various critical responses, the New Republic praised it as a novel “in the tradition of many classics”, and compared it favourably with Moby-Dick (No 17 in this series).
The New York Times critic snootily observed that it wasn’t “a great novel or a completely finished work of art. It is as bumpy and uneven as a corduroy road, somewhat irresolute and confused in its approach to vital problems and not always convincing. Nevertheless, [it] is magnificently vital reading, a book so charged with dramatic tension it almost crackles with blue sparks; a book so drenched with fierce emotion, narrative pace and poetic imagery that its stature as a ‘readin’ book,’ as some of its characters would call it, dwarfs that of most current publications.”
Willie Stark was possibly inspired by the life of senator Huey Long, the aggressively populist governor of Louisiana and the state’s senator in the mid-1930s. Long was at the peak of his career when he was assassinated in 1935. A year earlier, Penn Warren had been teaching at Louisiana’s state university. Stark, like Long, is shot to death in the state capitol building. The title of the book was possibly inspired, in part, by Long’s populist motto, “Every man a king.”
Penn Warren, however, was always troubled by the identification of Willie Stark with Huey Long. He once complained that this had led to nonsensical and “contradictory interpretations of the novel”. He continued: “On one hand, there were those who took the thing to be a not-so-covert biography of, and apologia for, Senator Long, and the author to be not less than a base minion of the great man. There is really nothing to reply to this innocent boneheadedness or gospel-bit hysteria. As Louis Armstrong is reported to have said, there’s some folks that, if they don’t know, you can’t tell ’em...
“But on the other hand, there were those who took the thing to be a rousing declaration of democratic principles and a tract for the assassination of dictators. This view, though somewhat more congenial to my personal political views, was almost as wide of the mark. For better or worse, Willie Stark was not Huey Long… The difference between the person Huey P Long and the fictional Willie Stark may be indicated by the fact that in the verse play [Proud Flesh] the name of the politician was Talos — the name of the brutal, blank-eyed ‘iron groom’ of Spenser’s Fairie Queene, the pitiless servant of the knight of justice. My conception grew wider, but that element always remained, and Willie Stark remained, in one way, Willie Talos. In other words, Talos is the kind of doom that democracy may invite upon itself. The book, however, was never intended to be a book about politics. Politics merely provided the framework story in which the deeper concerns, whatever their final significance, might work themselves out.”
Half a century after the first printing of All the King’s Men, a southern academic, Noel Polk, undertook a “restored” edition. This version proved almost as controversial as the original. Writing in the New York Times, Joyce Carol Oates declared that “the 1946 text, for all its flaws, is superior to the ‘restored’ text, which primarily restores distracting stylistic tics and the self-consciously mythic name Willie Talos, which Warren had dropped in favour of the more plausible Willie Stark.
“That Robert Penn Warren, novelist, poet, essayist, and shrewd literary critic, not only approved the original 1946 edition of his most famous novel but oversaw numerous reprintings through the decades, including a special 1963 edition published by Time Inc with a preface by the author, and did not ‘restore’ any of the original manuscript, and did not resuscitate ‘Willie Talos,’ is the irrefutable argument that the 1946 edition is the one Warren would wish us to read.
“That Noel Polk should make a project of ‘restoring’ a text in this way, and that this text should be published to compete with the author-approved text, is unconscionable, unethical, and indefensible.”
For some critics, Robert Penn Warren remains hard to categorise (an otherwise comprehensive recent study of Anglo-American fiction, The Novel: A Biography by Michael Schmidt, almost ignores him), but his work lives on in the minds of his devoted readers, including this one, who first read him on an Amtrak train between Washington and Philadelphia in the autumn of 1974.
Three more from Robert Penn Warren
Night Rider (1939); At Heaven’s Gate (1943); Promises (1957).
THE GUARDIAN
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)
003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)
011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
017 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
026 The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
027 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
028 New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)
038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
054 The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
055 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
056 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
057 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)
058 Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (1932)
059 Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)
060 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
061 Murphy by Samuel Beckett ( 1938)
062 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
063 Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
064 At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)
065 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
066 Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
067 All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
068 Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
061 Murphy by Samuel Beckett ( 1938)
062 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
063 Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
064 At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)
065 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
066 Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
067 All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
068 Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)
073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)
078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
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