All the King's Men (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Fortunately, All the King's Men is also a novel that remains readable after several readings; it offers readers something new each time they pick it up.

Well,I was wondering what happened to you (and hoping you hadn’t become the latest to contract COVID!Yes, I love books about politics so long as they’re not pushing a specific political agenda – the whole democracy thing is so fascinating because it feels as if it is the right way to go, and yet so often ends up mired in corruption.

Stark steals Burden’s desired woman and sets in motion a complicated plot that makes Burden the instrument of a man he discovers only too late to be his own father. It is as bumpy and uneven as a corduroy road, somewhat irresolute and confused in its approach to vital problems and not always convincing. All the King’s Men is not merely the story of Willie Stark, as Warren’s world is brimming with fascinating side characters. This is particularly demonstrated in a tense dinner scene where Jack defends The Boss’ methods, claiming if state government ‘….Judge Irwin is an elderly gentleman whom Jack has known since childhood, a man who is essentially a father-figure to him. Governor Willie Stark is the king mentioned in the book’s title and his men are composed of Sadie Burke, his secretary and long-time lover, Jack Burden, his right hand and sounding board, Tiny Duffy an obsequious man Stark would rather have with him than against him and Sugar Boy, his faithful driver.

It also introduces into the novel an explanation of the ways in which one person's actions affect other people and ripple outward from the center, touching both the present and the future. It would benefit from more wheeling and dealing on [Stark’s] part, more scenes of gritty in-the-trenches governance. I’ve never read it and was just looking at it yesterday, trying to decide if I wanted to read it or a biography of Long. 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. 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.Joyce Carol Oates, "The New York Review of Books" PRAISE FOR"ALL THE KING'S MEN" "Over the course of more than two centuries of vivid political history, there is perhaps only one full-blooded American novel of politics that plunges deep into the hearts of its characters and therefore into the hearts of its readers, thus rising to the top ranks of American fiction. PRAISE FOR "ALL THE KING'S MEN" "Over the course of more than two centuries of vivid political history, there is perhaps only one full-blooded American novel of politics that plunges deep into the hearts of its characters and therefore into the hearts of its readers, thus rising to the top ranks of American fiction. Jack suggests that one reason he is unable to complete his dissertation on Cass's life is that perhaps "he was afraid to understand for what might be understood there was a reproach to him. The cover of at least one edition, for example, proclaims that it is a novel about "the rise and fall of an American dictator! But if anything is certain it is that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over, and it isn’t the game that is over, it is just an inning, and that game has a lot more than nine innings.

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. Meanwhile, he also finds out about Anne and Jack's past relationship and Anne's continued love for Jack, leading to a fallout between him and Anne. Despite the positive reviews, in 1974, All the King's Men was challenged at the Dallas, Texas, Independent School District high school libraries for depicting a "depressing view of life" and "immoral situations". At its release, the New York Times hailed it as "magnificently vital reading, a book so charged with dramatic tension it almost crackles. All the King’s Men is a brilliant novel that allies Stark’s rise and fall and Jack’s private life as he finally finds some peace.

Funnily enough I was thinking I’d quite like to read a biography of him too as a sort of companion piece, so please let me know if you find a good one. You cross the Mojave at night and even at night your breath rasps your gullet as though you were a sword swallower who had got hold of a hack-saw blade by mistake, and in the darkness the hunched rock and towering cactus loom at you with the shapes of a visceral, Freudian nightmare.