9780156004800

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Set in the '30s, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel traces the rise and fall of demagogue Willie Stark, a fictional character who resembles the real-life Huey "Kingfish" Long of Louisiana. Stark begins his political career as an idealistic man of the people but soon becomes corrupted by success and caught between dreams of service and an insatiable lust for power. The model for 1996's best-selling novel, Primary Colors, and as relevant today as it was fifty years ago, All the King's Men is one of the classics of American literature.

"...[W]hen I entered Louisiana, my imagination was already trapped in speculation about the struggle for power in the world of politics--specifically in a Southern state....[I]f you were living in Louisiana, you knew you were living in history defining itself before your eyes. And you knew that you were not seeing a half-drunk hick buffoon performing an old routine, but were witnessing a drama which was a version of the world's drama, and the drama of history, too, the old drama of power and ethics....One of my duties was to teach a senior Shakespeare class, and in Shakespeare that question of power and ethics--and the question of determination in history--is frequent and vivid. I read Shakespeare, and many books about him, with a growing thought of Huey [Long]--who, behind his mask of idiotic or vulgar clowning, might suddenly be brilliant, inevitable, ruthless."

Joseph Blotner

"'Willie Stark,' the character [Warren] created from Huey Long, is one of the giants of American literature and will probably be remembered long after Huey himself is forgotten. Except in Louisiana, of course."

Robert Penn Warren, New York Times Book Review, 5/31/81

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