The chapter pushes against the conventional narrative that Lowell’s breakthrough style of the 1950s, the colloquial and conversational diction of Life Studies, originated mostly with his immersion in William Carlos Williams’s poetry and his fascination with the Beats and Allen Ginsberg. Rather, it argues that Lowell fashioned the new confessional style out of inspirations and influences he had received from Robert Penn Warren and Randall Jarrell, who had shown sustained interest in how the practice of prose writing could refresh postwar poetic styles. Weaving together multiple strands of neglected evidence from their overlapping biographies, their letters, and reviews, Joan Shifflett argues that Life Studies owes more to Warren’s Brother to Dragons and Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution than has previously been acknowledged.

All the King’s Men is one of the most significant political novels in US literature. Based on the career of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long, the novel follows the rise and fall of the fictional Willie Stark. This chapter traces Stark’s development as a populist, using the work of Michael Kazin and others to argue that populism must be defined by its rhetorical characteristics. We know that a political actor is populist not necessarily by their policy proposals, but always by the way they talk. Populism is performed in a language of grievance. The populist uses an emotive rhetoric that invokes a binary of “the people” against an “elite” above them and a racialized poor below them. The populist politician positions himself as “the people’s” representative, the only one who can speak and act on their behalf. This chapter analyzes speeches in All the King’s Men, demonstrating how they embody the populist binary and its rhetorical moves. Ultimately, the chapter considers the economic and social conditions that can allow a demagogue to rise in fiction and in real life.