All the King's Men | All the Burdens of All the King’s Men

In the following essay, Justus examines Warren’s
inspiration and intent in All the King’s Men,
calling it “in the most explicit way a fictional ordering
of events and motifs crucial to Warren’s maturity.”

1.
Warren reports that he “stumbled” into the writing of fiction when he was at Oxford, where he sought to put down on paper some of the “tales” he had once talked about with his friend Paul Rosenfeld. “Fiction was for me,” he remembers, “a way of reliving life that I was separate from—3,000 miles away from.” Those oral tales became “Prime Leaf,” and this early version of Night Rider reflected the imaginative “reliving,” not of narrative lines (whose literal events occurred about the time Warren was born), but of the human circumstances of...

[The entire page is 7206 words long]

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