All the King’s Men (1946). Content and Description

Originally published by Harcourt, Brace in 1946, All the King’s Men received the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 and established Warren’s reputation as a novelist. The novel tells the story of Willie Stark, a corrupt politician who resembles Huey P. Long, “the Kingfish,” former governor of Louisiana and U.S. senator during the 1930s. Warren, however, cautioned against drawing direct parallels with Long, as he explains in the introduction to the 1953 Random House edition of the novel:

One of the unfortunate characteristics of our time is that the reception of a novel may depend on its journalistic relevance. It is a little graceless of me to call this characteristic unfortunate, and to quarrel with it, for certainly the journalistic relevance of All the King’s Men had a good deal to do with what interest it evoked. My politician hero, whose name in the end, was Willie Stark, was quickly equated with the late Senator Huey P. Long, whose fame, even outside of Louisiana, was yet green in pious tears, anathema, and speculation. . . . For better or for worse, Willie Stark was not Huey Long.

Willie was only himself, whatever that self turned out to be, a shadowy wraith or a blundering human being. . . . Now in making this disclaimer again, I do not mean to imply that there was no connection between Governor Stark and Senator Long. Certainly, it was the career of Long and the atmosphere of Louisiana that suggested the play that was to become the novel. But suggestion does not mean identity, and even if I had wanted to make Stark a projection of Long, I should not have known how to go about it.

For one reason, simply because I did not, and do not, know what Long was like, and what were the secret forces that drove him along his violent path to meet the bullet in the Capitol. And in any case, Long was but one of the figures that stood in the shadows of imagination behind Willie Stark. . . . Though I did not profess to be privy to the secret of Long’s soul, I did have some notions about the phenomenon of which Long was but one example, and I tried to put some of those notions into my book. (Introduction to All the King’s Men [New York: Random House, 1953])

Warren’s comments establish Long as an inspiration for the novel but also caution readers against either interpreting the novel in light of Long or trying to glean Long’s character from the book. It should be noted, however, that these comments are from a literary critic of the New Criticism school, which believed art works should stand alone and be evaluated without interjecting elements from “outside” the text. While Warren’s articulate defense of the novel should encourage all of us to consider the book outside a biographical framework, the “enveloping action”—the political climate of the time and the figure upon which Warren’s protagonist is roughly based—must be considered to appreciate both the novel’s many meanings and the critical sensation it created.

Thus, anyone reading All the King’s Men would be well advised to consult a trustworthy information source and learn about Long, whose larger-than-life personality stands above and beyond Warren’s character (the Social Security Administration maintains one of the many excellent Internet sites on Long’s career: http://www.ssa.gov/history/ hlong1.html).

The novel tells the story of Willie Stark, or “Willie Talos” in the Harcourt edition of the text fully restored and reintroduced by the literary scholar Noel Polk (textual editor of the works of William Faulkner). Polk’s edition follows Warren’s original intentions before the editorial process, during which, at the request of an editor, Warren changed the name from Talos to Stark. Talos is a symbolic name Warren took from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, book 5, in which Talus (a name Spenser drew from Talos in Greek mythology) is the “iron groom” who carries out punishments decreed by his master, Artegall, the knight of justice.

In Warren’s novel, Jack Burden—a former journalist now hired, as Talus in the Spenser story, to accomplish the dirty work of a powerful political leader—narrates Governor Willie Stark’s story. As is often the case with literary works written from such a first-person perspective, the novel is also the story of the narrator, Burden, who finds in Stark a mirror image of what he as a young journalist may become. Thus, the novel is also a story of initiation and self-discovery. As Burden tells about Stark’s political machinations and observes his rise, fall, and death, he learns about himself and the complexity of moral thinking. Burden is something of a mystery detective who gradually pieces together clues.

He, however, is what the critic Wayne Booth describes as an “unreliable narrator,” a mediating presence who inflects the action of the novel with his own biased perceptions. What makes the novel a great work of art is that it leaves room for us to filter Burden’s perceptions and interpretations and arrive at our own understanding of what takes place, what its significance is for Jack Burden, and what universal significance lies in Jack’s discoveries. As with the Greek demigod Epimetheus, who only understands matters in retrospect, Burden does not foresee the repercussions of his own misdeeds and is slow to piece together the significance of what Stark says and does.

By presenting an unreliable narrator who works to understand his self and the story of his mirror reflection, Willie Stark, Warren enables readers to pass judgment on both Stark and Burden. At times aware of what they are doing and at other times not, both have a negative impact on history, where individual actions have a rippling effect. For Warren, history provides the perspective from which value judgments can be made. While Stark makes his mark as a reformer, he ultimately becomes an unscrupulous politician hungry for power. Yet, despite Stark’s evil deeds and self- aggrandizing schemes, he does accomplish things that benefit humanity, such as developing a massive interstate infrastructure, pouring money into public education, and building a free clinic. Such complex ethical situations leave Jack Burden and the reader to weigh good and evil.

By showing how Jack becomes a political pawn— one of the king’s men—the novel focuses on Jack’s experience: the way he begins to realize his place in the present and its relationship to the past. Importantly, the narrative never endorses one vision of reality; Jack is ambiguous about his own actions and interpretations and is ambivalent about Willie Stark. Yet Jack accepts “the awful responsibility of Time”: how his own ideas, actions, and words have meanings that affect everyone joined in the “web of being” (609).

As the narrative progresses and as Jack learns about the complex web spun by the political world, the narrative details Willie’s disillusionment and many of the questionable decisions he makes. As do Sophocles’ Oedipus and many other tragic figures, Willie Stark fails to reach his potential. Ultimately, All the King’s Men explores such grand themes as the way history affects the present; the inherent dangers of power, which in the novel is portrayed as a corruptive, blinding force; the alienation of the individual in the modern world; and the duty we all have to understand ourselves, come to terms with our past, and accept responsibility for our lives and the ways they affect others.

These themes emerge as Jack Burden realizes his identity against the mercurial rise and fall of Huey P. Long’s literary counterpart, Willie Stark. History functions in the novel as the backdrop against which Warren explores our lives and the tragic nature of the human condition.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Warren’s first draft of All the King’s Men began at the outset of Willie’s career rather than with his encounter with Judge Irwin. Why do you think Warren decided to alter the novel’s original sequence, presenting many of its events out of chronological order? What effect does this have on you as a reader?

2. The story Jack uncovers in his first “excursion into the past,” his dissertation on Cass Mastern’s journal, makes up a considerable portion of chapter 4 (224). How is this episode significant to the novel as a whole? How do the novel’s later events help Jack better understand why Cass accepts responsibility for Duncan Trice’s suicide?

3. The novel’s title is a literary allusion, a reference by one text to another text. The title refers to the third line of the popular Mother Goose rhyme “Humpty Dumpty”:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
Keeping the allusion in mind, discuss the meaning of the novel’s title.