All the King's Men By: Robert Penn Warren

All the King's Men by: Robert Penn Warren

Author-

Robert Penn Warren (24 Apr. 1905-15 Sept. 1989), author and educator, was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, the son of Robert Franklin Warren, a businessman, and Anna Ruth Penn, a schoolteacher. Throughout Warren's childhood on a Kentucky tobacco farm he heard tales of the Civil War from his grandfathers, both of whom had fought for the Confederacy. These stories provided a rich source of memories and images that, he later remarked, nurtured his art. The shaping influence of this southern heritage is inescapable in any consideration of Warren's life. Although he left the South for good when he was thirty-seven years old, he never left it in spirit, and much of his artistic energy was expended in an effort to reconcile his loyalty to the region with the claims of modernism.

Rate-

The book All the King's Men is a very sophisticated book. It is mostly about politics, so I was really unable to get the full effect. The book was also really based on metaphors. When it came to details, Mr. Warren was there to explain. It was a fairly good book for my part, but some parts I did have a little trouble with. I wouldn't suggest that it be a children's book, but I do think it is a very good adult novel.

Anecdotes-

Passage 1 Ð'-

He stood there a half minute, not saying a word, and not moving. He didn't even seem to be noticing the crowd down there. Then he seemed, all at once, to discover them, and grinned. "So he comes back," he said, grinning now. "When he gets half a day off. And he says, hello, folks, how you making it? And that's what I'm saying."

That's what he said. He looked down, grinning, and his head turned as his eyes went down in the crowd, and seemed to stop on a face there, and then go on to stop on another face.

Then he started walking down the steps, just as if he had just come out of that dusky-dark hallway beyond the big open doors behind him and was walking down the steps by himself, with nobody there in front of him and no eyes on him. He came straight down the steps toward where his gang was standing. Lucy Talos and the rest of us, and nodded at us like he was simply passing us on the street and didn't know us any too well anyway, and kept right on walking, straight into the crowd as though the crowd weren't there. The people fell back a little to make a passage for him, with their eyes looking right at him, and the rest of us in his gang followed behind him, and the crowd closed up behind us.

-Pages 16 and 17

Passage 2 Ð'-

"Those fellows in the striped pants saw the hick and they took him in. They said how MacMurfee was a limber-back and a dead-head and how Joe Harrison was the tool of the city machine, and how they wanted that hick to step in and try to give some honest government. They told him that. ButÐ'--"Willie stopped, and lifted his right hand clutching the manuscript to high heavenÐ'--"do you know who they were? They were Joe Harrison's hired hands and lickspittles and they wanted to get a hick to run to split MacMurfee's hick vote. Did I guess this? I did not. No, for I heard their sweet talk. And I wouldn't know the truth this minute if that woman right thereÐ'--"and he pointed down at Sadie, "if that woman right thereÐ'--"

I nudged Sadie and said, "Sister, you are out of a job."

"Ð'--if that fine woman right there hadn't been honest enough and decent enough to tell the foul truth which stinks in the nostrils of the Most High!"

--Page 129

Passage 3 Ð'-

For example. But I cannot give you an example. It was not so much any one example, any one event, which I recollected which was important, but the flow, the texture of the events, for meaning is never in the event but in the motion through event. Otherwise we could isolate an instant in the event and say that this is the event itself. The meaning. But we cannot do that. For it is the motion which is important. And I was moving. I was moving West at seventy-five miles an hour, though a blur of million-dollar landscape and heroic history, and I was moving back through time into my memory. They say the drowning man re-lives his life as he drowns. Well, I was not drowning in water, but I was drowning in West. I drowned westward through the hot brass days and the black velvet nights. It took me seventy-eight hours to drown. For my body to sink down to the very bottom of West and lie in the motionless ooze of History, naked on a hotel bed in Long Beach, California.

-Pages 378 and 379

Passage 4 Ð'-

It was a tentative, apologetic sort of smile, which said please and thank you and at the same time expressed an innocent and absolute confidence that your better nature would triumph. I walked across the hot pavement toward that smile and the green polka-dot figure which stood there behind the glass like something put in a showcase for you to admire but not touch. Then I laid my hand on the glass of the door, and pushed, and left the street, where the air was hot and sticky like a Turkish bath and where the smell of gasoline fumes mixed with the brackish, dead-sweet smell of the river which crept into the city on still nights in summer, and entered the bright, crisp, antiseptic, cool world behind the glass where the smile was, for there is nothing brighter, crisper, more antiseptic, and cooler than a really first-rate corner drug store on a hot summer night. If Anne Stanton is inside the door and the air-conditioning is working.

The smile was on me and the eyes looked straight at me and she put out her hand. I took it, thought how cool and small and firm it was, as though I were just discovering the fact, and heard her say, "It looks like I'm always calling you up, Jack."

--Page 449

Character-

Jack Burden - Willie Stark's political right-hand man, the narrator of the novel and in many ways its protagonist. Jack comes from a prominent family (the town he grew up in, Burden's Landing, was named for his ancestors), and knows many of the most important people in the state. Despite his aristocratic background, Jack allies himself with the liberal, amoral Governor Stark, to the displeasure of his family and friends. He uses his considerable skills as a researcher