All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren | Introduction & Overview

All the King's Men Introduction

Critics greeted the August 1946 publication of All the King's Men with immediate high praise. Diana Trilling in the Nation proclaimed it "a very remarkable piece of novel-writing," adding, "I doubt indeed whether it can be matched in American fiction." Two years later, Walter Allen, reviewing the novel's British release in The New Statesman & Nation called it "a very formidable attempt at a novel on the grand scale."

On a very basic level, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men can be identified as a roman à clef, a novel in which real persons appear as fictional characters. Readers recognized the novel's demagogic southern governor, Willie Stark, as similar to Huey P. Long, "the Kingfish," former governor of Louisiana and that state's U. S. senator in the mid- 1930s. Jack Burden, right-hand man to Governor Stark, narrates the novel, recounting the rise and fall of his boss....
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