All the King’s Men (Magill Book Reviews)
At a glance:
- Author: Robert Penn Warren
- First Published: 1946
- Type of Work: Political Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, Social realism, Roman à clef
- Subjects: Journalism or journalists, Power, personal or social, Murder or homicide, South or Southerners, 1920’s, 1930’s, Blackmail, Politicians, Assassination, Corruption, Scandal, Bribery
- Locales: South (U.S.)
This novel has a double focus: first, on the narrator, Jack Burden, and his effort to understand his employer, Willie Stark, and second, on Stark himself, a protean figure who is sympathetically portrayed. Burden is a student of history, a Ph.D. candidate who abandons his notecards for the dissertation he never writes because he cannot make his sense of the past cohere. Stark is a man of the present, who believes that the means justify the end--that is, he operates in a world of graft, bribery, and coercion in order to build better highways, schools, hospitals, and the other things that...
[The entire page is 697 words long]
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