Book Summary and Reviews of All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

All The King's Men

by Robert Penn Warren

  • Published:
  • Jan 2005, 661 pages
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Book Summary

When All the King's Men was first published in 1946, Sinclair Lewis pronounced it "massive, impressive...one of our few national galleries of character."

Diana Trilling, reviewing it for the Nation, wrote, "For sheer virtuosity, for the sustained drive of its prose, for the speed and the evenness of its pacing, for its precision of language...I doubt indeed whether it can be matched in American fiction." The Washington Post declared, "If the game of naming the Great American Novel is still being played anywhere, Warren's All the King's Men would easily make the final rounds." Set in the 1930s, 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. As relevant today as it was more than fifty years ago, All the King's Men is one of the classics of American literature.

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This information about All The King's Men was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) was born in Guthrie, Kentucky. In his lifetime he won three Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, a National Medal for Literature, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a MacArthur Prize, and was named the country's first Poet Laureate in 1986.

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