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The American Novelist and American History: A Revaluation of All The King's Men
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
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.
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References
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
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6 Ibid.
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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