''All the King's Men'' is a 1946 novel by
Robert Penn Warren. The novel tells the story of charismatic
populist governor Willie Stark and his political machinations in the Depression-era
Deep South. It was inspired by the real-life story of U.S. Senator
Huey P. Long, who was assassinated in 1935. Its title is drawn from the
Charles Perrault nursery rhyme "
Humpty Dumpty."
Warren won the
Pulitzer Prize for ''All the King's Men'' in 1947. It was later adapted into two films of the same name, in
1949 and
2006; the 1949 version won the
Academy Award for Best Picture. The novel has received critical acclaim and remained perennially popular since its first publication. It was rated the
36th greatest novel of the 20th century by
Modern Library, and it was chosen as one of
''Time'' magazine's
100 best novels since 1923.
''All the King's Men'' portrays the dramatic and theatrical political rise and governorship of Willie Stark, a cynical populist in the 1930s
American South. The novel is narrated by Jack Burden, a political reporter who comes to work as Governor Stark's right-hand man. The trajectory of Stark's career is interwoven with Jack Burden's life story and philosophical reflections: "the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story."
The novel evolved from a
verse play that Warren began writing in 1936 entitled ''Proud Flesh''. One of the characters in ''Proud Flesh'' was named Willie Talos, in reference to the brutal character Talus in
Edmund Spenser's late 16th-century epic poem ''
The Faerie Queene''.
A 2002 version of ''All the King's Men'', re-edited by Noel Polk, keeps the name "Willie Talos" for the Boss as originally written in Warren's manuscript, and is known as the "restored edition" for using this name as well as printing several passages removed from the original edit.
Warren claimed that ''All the King's Men'' was "never intended to be a book about politics."
Themes and imagery
A central motif of the novel is that all actions have consequences and that it is impossible for an individual to stand aloof and be a mere observer of life, as Jack tries to do (first as a graduate student doing historical research and later as a wisecracking newspaperman). In the atmosphere of the 1930s, the whole population seemed to abandon responsibility by living vicariously through messianic political figures like Willie Stark. Thus, Stark fulfills the wishes of many of the characters, or seems to do so. For instance, his faithful bodyguard Sugar-Boy, who stutters, loves Stark because "the b-boss could t-talk so good", and Jack Burden cannot bring himself to sleep with Anne Stanton, whom he loves, although Stark does so. It is in that sense that the characters are "all the king's men", a line taken from the poem
Humpty Dumpty (Warren biographer Joseph Blotner also notes, "Like Humpty Dumpty, each of the major characters has experienced a fall of some kind"). The title is derived from the motto of
Huey P. Long, whose life was similar to that of Willie Stark, "Every Man a King", but that vicarious achievement will eventually fail. Jack ultimately realizes that one must "go out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time".
The "Great Twitch" is a particular brand of
nihilism that Jack embraces during his journey westward: "all the words we speak meant nothing and there was only the pulse in the blood and the twitch of the nerve, like a dead frog's leg in the experiment when the electric current goes through." On his way back from California, Jack gives a ride to an old man who has an involuntary facial twitch. This image becomes for him the encapsulating metaphor for the idea that "all life is but the dark heave of blood and the twitch of the nerve."
Subsequent events (including the tragic deaths of Governor Stark, Jack's lifelong friend Adam Stanton, and Judge Irwin, Jack's father) convince Jack that the revelation of the "Great Twitch" is an insufficient paradigm to explain what he has seen of history. "
saw that though doomed,
is friends
In linguistics, a copula (plural: copulas or copulae; abbreviated ) is a word or phrase that links the subject of a sentence to a subject complement, such as the word ''is'' in the sentence "The sky is blue" or the phrase ''was not being'' in ...
had nothing to do with any doom under the godhead of the Great Twitch. They were doomed, but they lived in the agony of will."
Characters
Willie Stark
The central character of Willie Stark (often simply referred to as "the Boss") undergoes a radical transformation from an idealistic lawyer and weak
gubernatorial
A governor is an administrative leader and head of a polity or political region, ranking under the head of state and in some cases, such as governors-general, as the head of state's official representative. Depending on the type of politica ...
candidate into a
charismatic and extraordinarily powerful governor. In achieving this office Stark comes to embrace various forms of corruption and builds an enormous political machine based on
patronage and intimidation. His approach to politics earns him many enemies in the state legislature, but does not detract from his popular appeal among many of his constituents, who respond with enthusiasm to his fiery populist manner.
Stark's character was inspired by the life of
Huey P. Long, former governor of Louisiana and that state's
U.S. senator
The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress, with the House of Representatives being the lower chamber. Together they compose the national bicameral legislature of the United States.
The composition and power ...
in the mid-1930s. Huey Long was at the zenith of his career when he was assassinated in 1935; just a year earlier, Robert Penn Warren had begun teaching at
Louisiana State University. Stark, like Long, is shot to death in the state capitol building by a physician. The title of the book possibly came from Long's motto, "Every Man a King" or his nickname, Kingfish. In his introduction to the Modern Library edition, Warren denied that the book should be read as either praise for Huey Long or praise for his assassination:
Jack Burden
Jack Burden is the novel's narrator, a former student of history, newspaper columnist, and personal aide to Governor Willie Stark.
His narrative is propelled in part by a fascination with the mystery of Stark's larger-than-life character, and equally by his struggle to discover some underlying principle to make sense of all that has happened. In narrating the story, Jack commingles his own personal story with the political story of Governor Stark.
Anne Stanton
Anne is Jack Burden's childhood sweetheart and the daughter of Willie Stark's political predecessor, Governor Stanton. Many of the novel's passages recounting Jack's life story revolve around memories of his relationship with Anne. Like many of Jack's friends, Anne disapproves of Willie Stark. However, in the wake of a devastating revelation regarding one of her father's moral lapses, she has an affair with Stark.
Adam Stanton
Adam is a highly successful doctor, Anne Stanton's brother, and Jack Burden's childhood friend. Jack comes to view Adam Stanton as the polar opposite of Governor Stark, calling Adam "the man of idea" and Stark "the man of fact".
[Page 436.] Elsewhere, he describes Adam's central motivation as a deep need to "do good". Governor Stark invites Adam to be director of his pet project, a new hospital and medical center. The position initially strikes Adam as repugnant because of his revulsion to Stark's politics, but Jack and Anne ultimately persuade him to accept the invitation, essentially by removing his moral high ground. Adam's sense of violation as a result of his entanglement with Governor Stark proves violently tragic when he is informed by Lieutenant Governor Tiny Duffy that Stark has been sleeping with his sister. Adam tells Anne, "he wouldn't be paid pimp to his sister's whore". His pride demolished, Adam finds the Governor at the Capitol building and shoots him.
Judge Irwin
Judge Irwin is an elderly gentleman whom Jack has known since childhood, a man who is essentially a father-figure to him. Willie Stark assigns Jack the task of digging through Irwin's past to find something with which Irwin can be blackmailed. Jack investigates thoroughly and finds what he is looking for: an incident many years ago when Judge Irwin took a bribe to dismiss a lawsuit against a fuel company, resulting in the personal destruction of a man named Mortimer Littlepaugh. Jack presents the incriminating evidence to Irwin, and before he has a chance to use it against him, Irwin commits suicide. Only at this point does Jack learn from his mother that Irwin was his father.
Cass Mastern
One of Jack Burden's first major historical research projects revolves around the life of a 19th-century
collateral ancestor, Cass Mastern, a man of high moral standards and a student at
Transylvania College in
Kentucky. Cass's story, as revealed through his journals and letters, is essentially about a single betrayal of a friend that seems to ripple endlessly outward with negative consequences for many people. In studying this fragment of
Civil War–era history, Jack begins to suspect (but cannot yet bring himself to accept) the idea that every event has unforeseen and unknowable implications, and that all actions and all persons are connected to other actions and other persons. 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."
Film and stage adaptations
Besides the early verse play version ''Proud Flesh'', Robert Penn Warren wrote several stage adaptations of ''All the King's Men'', one of them in close collaboration with famous German theatre director
Erwin Piscator
Erwin Friedrich Maximilian Piscator (17 December 1893 – 30 March 1966) was a German theatre director and producer. Along with Bertolt Brecht, he was the foremost exponent of epic theatre, a form that emphasizes the socio-political content o ...
in 1947.
The story was adapted for radio by
NBC University Theatre and broadcast in January 1949.
Wayne Morris played Jack Burden, with
Paul Frees as Willie Stark.
''
All the King's Men'', a movie made based on Warren's novel, was released several months later in 1949. The film won three
Oscars that year:
Best Picture,
Best Actor
Best Actor is the name of an award which is presented by various film, television and theatre organizations, festivals, and people's awards to leading actors in a film, television series, television film or play.
The term most often refers to the ...
(
Broderick Crawford
William Broderick Crawford (December 9, 1911 – April 26, 1986) was an American stage, film, radio, and television actor, often cast in tough-guy roles and best known for his Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning portrayal of Willie Stark in ''All th ...
), and
Best Supporting Actress (
Mercedes McCambridge). The movie was also nominated for four more categories. In 2001, the United States
Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant", and selected it for preservation in the
National Film Registry. It is noted, however, for deviating significantly from the novel's storyline.
NBC network's ''
Kraft Television Theatre'' broadcast a television version of ''
All the King's Men'' in May 1958. This adaptation was directed by
Sidney Lumet and starred
Neville Brand as Willie Stark.
A Soviet TV adaptation titled ''
Vsya Korolevskaya Rat'' was produced in 1971 by Byelorussian TV. It starred
Georgiy Zhzhonov (Willie Stark),
Mikhail Kozakov
Mikhail Mikhailovich Kozakov (in Russian: Михаил Михайлович Козаков) (14 October 1934, Leningrad – 22 April 2011, Ramat Gan) was a Soviet, Russian and Israeli film and theatre director and actor.
Biography Early life
Mi ...
(Jack Burden),
Alla Demidova
Alla Sergeyevna Demidova (russian: link=no, А́лла Серге́евна Деми́дова; born 29 September 1936, Moscow) is a Russian actress internationally acclaimed for the tragic parts in innovative plays staged by Yuri Lyubimov in th ...
(Anne),
Oleg Yefremov
Oleg Nikolayevich Yefremov (russian: Оле́г Никола́евич Ефре́мов, 1 October 1927, Moscow, Soviet Union – 24 May 2000, Moscow, Russia) was a Soviet and Russian actor and Moscow Art Theatre producer. He was a People's Artist ...
(Adam),
Rostislav Plyatt
Rostislav Yanovich Plyatt (russian: Ростислав Янович Плятт; — 30 June 1989) was a Soviet and Russian stage and film actor. He was named People's Artist of the USSR in 1961 and awarded the USSR State Prize in 1982.
Biography ...
(Irwin),
Lev Durov (Sugar Boy). Initially
Pavel Luspekayev starred as Willie Stark, but he was gravely ill at that time and died of
aortic dissection only after 30% of filming was completed, thus the movie director asked Georgiy Zhzhonov to substitute the vacated role.
Another
film version was produced in 2006 by writer/director
Steven Zaillian, who wanted to more faithfully follow Warren's version of the story than the original film did. However, it was a critical and commercial disappointment.
American composer
Carlisle Floyd adapted the novel as a full-length grand opera entitled ''
Willie Stark
''Willie Stark'' is an opera in three acts and nine scenes by Carlisle Floyd to his own libretto, after the 1946 novel ''All the King's Men'' by Robert Penn Warren, which in turn was inspired by the life of the Louisiana governor Huey Long. The o ...
'', commissioned and premiered by the
Houston Grand Opera in 1981.
Adrian Hall adapted and directed a stage version of the novel at
Trinity Repertory Company in
Providence, Rhode Island
Providence is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. One of the oldest cities in New England, it was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, a Reformed Baptist theologian and religious exile from the Massachusetts ...
in April 1987. This adaptation has been staged at Trinity and other theater companies in the years since.
Critical reception
Contemporary response to the novel was largely positive.
Writing in the ''
New Republic'', George Mayberry wrote that the novel was "in the tradition of many classics", comparing the novel favorably with ''
Moby-Dick'', ''
The Sun Also Rises'', and ''
The Great Gatsby''. "The single quality that encompasses these varied books", he wrote, "is the use of the full resources of the American language to record with imagination and intelligence a significant aspect of our life." He ended the review saying, "All together it is the
finest American novel in more years than one would like to have to remember."
''
The New York Times Book Review''
Orville Prescott praised the book's energy, writing that "
isn'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, Robert Penn Warren's ''All the King's Men'' 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."
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".
Awards
Robert Penn Warren's novel was the winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize.
See also
* ''
All the President's Men''
*
Politics in fiction
* ''
All the Shah's Men''
References
Further reading
* Cullick, Jonathan S. ''Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: A Reader's Companion'' (2018).
* Garrison, Justin D. "'The Agony of Will': Political Morality in Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men". ''American Political Thought'' 5.4 (2016): 604–627.
* Meckier, Jerome. "Burden's Complaint: The Disintegrated Personality as Theme and Style in Robert Penn Warren's 'All The King's Men'". ''Studies in the Novel'' (1970) 2.1 pp: 7-21
online* Tibbetts, John C., and James M. Welsh, eds. ''The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Film'' (2nd ed. 2005) pp 12–14.
* Vauthier, Simone. "The Case of the Vanishing Narratee: An Inquiry into 'All the King's Men'" ''Southern Literary Journal'' (1974): 42–69
Online
External links
Proceedings of a symposium on ''All the King's Men''sponsored by the
Maine Humanities Council
The 'Maine Humanities Council (MHC)
was founded in 1975 as a private nonprofit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is one of 56 humanities councils in the United States and its territories. The MHC is also home of the Harri ...
in October 2007
Photos of the first edition of ''All the King's Men''
{{DEFAULTSORT:All The King's Men
1946 American novels
Novels about politicians
Pulitzer Prize for the Novel-winning works
Novels about elections
American novels adapted into films
Novels by Robert Penn Warren
American political novels
Roman à clef novels
Harcourt (publisher) books
Huey Long
American novels adapted into plays
Southern United States in fiction
First-person narrative novels