All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren
Summary
Willie Stark starts as a hick lawyer in an unnamed Deep South state, gets used by the machine as a decoy candidate, discovers on a courthouse platform what his own anger sounds like out loud, and rides it to the governorship. Once there he builds roads, hospitals and schools, and pays for them with blackmail, patronage and a private ledger on every man in the state, on the theory he states plainly: there is always something.
The genius of the novel is that Willie is not the narrator. Jack Burden is: a newspaperman from the state's old aristocracy who signs on as Stark's researcher, which means his blackmail clerk, and who tells the whole story in a voice that is cynical, literary and evasive about exactly one subject, himself. When Willie needs leverage on Judge Irwin, the upright man of Jack's childhood, it is Jack who digs, and what he finds detonates his own history as much as the state's.
Around it Warren wraps Jack's philosophy of not being responsible for anything, his lost love Anne Stanton, her brother Adam, a surgeon of murderous integrity, and a long interpolated chapter about Cass Mastern, an ancestor whose diary Jack once failed to face. Every thread pulls tight in the capitol lobby at the end.
It is dense, rhetorical, sometimes purple and completely alive, and it is generally counted the best political novel ever written in America.
Best for readers who want power studied honestly, by a book that refuses to decide whether the good Willie did required the evil.
Historical Context & Significance
All the King's Men won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1947. Everyone saw Huey Long in it, since Robert Penn Warren had taught at Louisiana State in the Kingfish's Baton Rouge and the parallels run to the assassination itself, and Warren spent decades insisting the reading was too small: Willie Stark was only himself, and the book began as a verse play, Proud Flesh, started in 1936.
The 1949 film won Best Picture and an Oscar for Broderick Crawford's Stark. The Modern Library placed the novel thirty sixth on its century list, and it sits on every serious ranking of American political fiction, usually first.
Warren's own career outran even this: he took Pulitzers in poetry in 1958 and 1979, making him the only writer to win the prize for both fiction and poetry, and became the first official Poet Laureate of the United States in 1986. But this is the book, and every American election year returns readers to it.