All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert Penn WarrenEditor: Noel Polk
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-09-03
ISBN: 0156012952
Number of pages: 656
Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of All the King's Men
Book Review: A great American classic
Summary: 5 Stars
If you are looking for a great example of American literature you can't do much better than Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize winning classic "All the King's Men". It ranks up there with Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Harper Lee, Truman Capote and all of the other greats. "All the King's Men" is a quintessentially American tale of politics, greed, corruption, idealism, friendship, betrayal, family, and just a touch of romance (but not too much -- this is, after all, a very masculine-centered novel). It is a sprawling tale of the political career of Willie Stark and his journey from the innocent do-gooder "Cousin Willie" to the jaded, corrupt "Boss" who governs the state of Louisiana with an iron fist. After a failed bid for governor where the idealistic young Stark is used as a pawn by one of the other candidates to siphon votes away from his competitor, Stark is crushed and left feeling like a sap. But he comes back and runs again with a new political attitude -- determined that if winning means playing the game that from now on he will outplay everyone else. And he does it, too, maneuvering and bribing and blackmailing his way to the top like a well oiled machine. When he sets his eyes on the Senate, however, his odyssey begins to spin into tragedy. His transformation is narrated by Jack Burden, a reporter who first met Stark when he was toiling thanklessly as county treasurer and later gets a job in his administration at the capital. Burden was, perhaps, once an idealist too but now stumbles cynically through life all too aware of the foibles inherent to human beings (his name, Burden, is quite apt for this position in which he must live). His struggle asks some meaty philosophical questions (can good exist without evil? Is it necessary to do bad things in order to have a good outcome, and is such a thing possible? and more) and thankfully doesn't get too bogged down moralizing the reader (although Warren does dangerously toe the line in a few parts). Reading this book was unique for me because I found myself unable to read it without a pen in hand so I could underline passages and write notes and reactions in the margins of the pages -- agreeing and disagreeing with what was being said. That was great fun, and it was a thrill to feel so involved in a book to be doing that. I do have a few minor complaints, however. I thought that Warren's chronology was slightly jarring as it went back and forth through time and took long detours to get to the point, but since those detours were usually filled with some meaty themes of their own I can forgive them. I thought that Warren's proclivity for repetition got annoying by the end of the book (hitting it zenith when Anne Stanton proclaimed in one flashback "Oh, Jackie, Jackie, it's a wonderful night, it's a wonderful night, it's a wonderful night, say it's a wonderful night, Jackie-boy, say it, say it!" on page 425), but since this is only really present in the dialogue -- and mostly in Anne's dialogue at that -- I can forgive this too. I also took offense to Warren's portrayal of women as either manipulative or wishy-washy but always responsible for the downfalls or travails of men. That's a tough one to get by, but since he can be equally critical of men for their own corruptions and failings I guess I won't let it bother me too much. It's very much a product of the time it was written and of the setting it depicts, and you can't necessarily fault it for that. At any rate, on the whole I would definitely recommend this classic. I don't know how either of the film adaptations compare, but I can't imagine that they could accurately capture the scale of Warren's epic.
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