All the King's Men The Search for a Usable Past

A true hallmark of American fiction, All the King's Men tells the timeless story of the rise and fall of a southern politician, Willie Stark, and the effects of these events on the life of Jack Burden, the young man who narrates the story. Published to widespread acclaim in 1946, the novel won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for its author, the distinguished poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, and was subsequently made into an Academy Award-winning feature film, as well as a stage play. And while Warren obviously based Willie Stark on Huey Long, the infamous "Kingfish" governor of Louisiana, All the King's Men is far more than a roman a clef; in it Warren addresses the universal themes of good and evil, of freedom and responsibility, and provides a rich perspective on southern cultural history and American politics.
This first book-length study of All the King's Men argues that, rather than being primarily about an American political demagogue, the novel is fundamentally about a culture at war with itself - the conservative Old South struggling against the progressive New South - and that Burden, not Stark, is the central figure. Employing a chapter-by-chapter approach, Harold Woodell, the study's author, elucidates Stark's transformation from "Cousin Willie" to "The Boss," representing the values of the New South, and traces Burden's personal growth as inheritor of Old South traditions and reconciler of the Old and the New. Readers are given a thorough grounding in the myriad social changes affecting southern culture and politics during the early part of the twentieth century, along with a helpful chronological listing of the narrative's events and an incisive afterword contrasting Stark with Burden. A clearly written, eminently useful guide to understanding a complex masterpiece by one of our finest writers, All the King's Men: The Search for a Usable Past will enlighten and stimulate both students new to the novel and readers well acquainted with it.

Harold Woodell teaches southern literature at Clemson University.