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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Robert Penn Warren is a writer of extraordinarily diverse talents and interests. He is, among other things, one of the founders of the New Criticism, a poet and a poetic dramatist of national reputation (he won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his nineteen volumes of verse), and a gifted teacher. Above all, though, he is a writer whose moral and philosophical bias is towards the kind of historical specificity and social density which is perhaps the special preserve of the novel. This more than anything else accounts for the exceptional range and volume of his fictional writing and for the usual association of his name with one book in particular which is, by common consent, his finest achievement: All The King's Men, first published in 1946. Occasionally, a case has been made for the superiority of one of his other novels, and there have been one or two attempts to locate the centre of his work in the poetry. But these have been scattered, infrequent, and in the event, I think, unconvincing. All The King's Men remains his masterwork, and perhaps his most characteristic piece of fiction too, so that any assessment of Warren the imaginative writer has ultimately to focus upon it.
1 See e.g. Allen, Walter, Tradition and Dream: the English and American Novel from the Twenties to Our Time (London, 1964), pp. 116–18Google Scholar; Casper, Leonard, A Colder Fire (Seattle, Wash., 1960).Google Scholar
2 Leavis was talking about James, Henry, The Great Tradition (London, 1950), p. 170.Google Scholar
3 Bradbury, John M., The Fugitives: A Critical Account (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1958), p. 209Google Scholar. For other examples of this approach to the novel, see e.g. Girault, N. R., ‘The Narrator's Mind as Symbol: An Analysis of All The King's Men’, Accent, 7 (1947), 220–34Google Scholar; Anderson, Charles P., ‘Violence and Order in the Novels of Robert Penn Warren’, Hopkins Rev., 6 (Winter, 1965), 88–105.Google Scholar
4 See e.g. the essay by Basso, Hamilton in All The King's Meanings, ed. by Rubin, L. D. (Baton Rouge, La., 1957)Google Scholar. Basso also wrote a book about Long which offers a very different picture of the Louisiana demagogue; The Sun in Capricorn (New York, 1942)Google Scholar. See also the essays in Sochatoff, F. A. (ed.), ‘All The King's Men: A Symposium’, Carnegie Stud, in Eng. 3 (1957).Google Scholar
5 All The King's Men (New York, 1946), ch. 10.Google Scholar
6 Ibid.
7 The following details are from Davis, Forrest, Huey Long, A Candid Biography (New York, 1935)Google Scholar; Carter, Hodding, ‘Huey Long, American Dictator’, The Aspirin Age, 1919–1941, ed. by Leighton, Isabel (London, 1950)Google Scholar; Sindler, Allan P., Huey Long's Louisiana: Slate Politics, 1920–1952 (Baltimore, Md., 1956)Google Scholar; Luthin, Reinhard H., ch. 10 of American Demagogues: Twentieth-Century (Gloucester, Mass., 1959).Google Scholar
8 Percy, William A., Lanterns on the Levee (New York, 1941), p. 144.Google Scholar
9 See e.g. Moley, Raymond, Twenty-Seven Masters of Politics (New York, 1949), p. 221.Google Scholar
10 See e.g. Warren, Robert Penn, Brother to Dragons: a Tale in Verse and Voices (New York, 1953), p. 214Google Scholar; ‘Knowledge and the Image of Man’, Sewanee Review, 63 (Spring, 1955), 186Google Scholar; The Great Mirage: Conrad and ‘Nostromo’, Selected Essays (London, 1958), p. 54.Google Scholar
11 The Yogi and the Commissar, and other essays (London, 1945).Google Scholar
12 All The King's Men, ch. 3.
13 Sindler, , Long's Louisiana, p. 97.Google Scholar
14 See e.g. Cash, Wilbur J., The Mind of the South (New York, 1941), Bk. 1, ch. 3.Google Scholar
15 Ibid.
16 In a large number of instances where Warren changes the original story, the explanation is more straightforward than that: for obvious reasons of dramatic emphasis and brevity, he simply permits one characteristic person or event to stand in the place of others, or he invents someone or something which epitomizes some broader aspect of Long/Stark's career. For example, the hospital and Stark's relationship with the Stantons serve to focus his idealistic impulses, just as Duffy, Sugar-Boy and the impeachment episode suggest his partial commitment to the world of back-room deals and violence. Nearly every chapter in the book contains a mixture of fiction and condensed fact which effectively emphasizes the tragic pattern just mentioned.
17 All The King's Men, ch. 2.
18 Ibid., ch. 7.
19 Ibid., ch. 4.
20 Warren, , Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York, 1965), p. 413Google Scholar. See also ‘Pure and Impure Poetry’, Selected Essays, p. 29Google Scholar; Katherine Anne Porter, ibid., p. 155. Warren has tried several times to embody this principle in a character, see e.g. the portraits of Willie Proudfit in Night Rider (New York, 1939)Google Scholar; Fort, Colonel in World Enough and Time (New York, 1950)Google Scholar; Blaustein, Aaron in Wilderness (New York, 1961)Google Scholar; and ‘Izzie’ Goldfarb in Flood (New York, 1964).Google Scholar