THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

Huey P. Long, known as "The Kingfish," controlled Louisiana politics for some ten years, until he was assassinated in 1935. He was the law, he was above the law-he ruled with the force of royalty through an effective political machine while serving as governor of the state (1928-31) and U.S. Senator (1931-35). But just as Humpty Dumpty in the nursery rhyme toppled off his perch, so did Robert Penn Warren's fictionalized Huey Long, Willie Stark in All the King's Men. Willie sat high on a wall, but had a great fall-and as you read Warren's novel you will understand why all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Willie together again.

On one level, then, All the King's Men is the study of the rise and fall of a political dictator in the southern United States. On another level, it is the study of a man's journey toward self-knowledge along the winding and difficult paths that emerge from the past. Many elements of Warren's own past went into making this novel. And although the novel explores age-old philosophical ideas, the ideas are not stale or moldy. They come alive because Warren grounds them in his own experience and in vivid characters who flourish and perish in a particular landscape-the American South.

Warren was born in 1905 in the tobacco country of Guthrie, Kentucky, the eldest son of a businessman and a schoolteacher. Political violence was a part of his earliest memories, The Kentucky tobacco wars of 1905 to 1908 raged in the surrounding areas. Many tobacco growers organized themselves against the big buyers, often riding into the night to terrorize other growers who were unsympathetic to their crusade for better prices. These events provided the background for Warren's first published novel, Night Rider (1939).

Poetry and history were also a part of Warren's childhood. His maternal grandfather, a Confederate cavalry officer in the Civil War, frequently quoted poetry to Warren and introduced him to Southern history. As a boy, Warren developed an allegiance to the South, a sense of history, and a love for literature. He read widely, from the great biologist Charles Darwin to detective stories, from Boy Scout manuals to American history books.

At sixteen, Warren entered Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, intending to become a chemical engineer. But while taking a freshman English course with the famous poet John Crowe Ransom, he turned toward a career in literature. As an undergraduate, Warren helped edit The Fugitive-a literary journal named for the image of the wandering outcast-and in it he published his first poems. The group-particularly John Crowe Ransom, Donald G. Davidson, Allen Tate, and Warren-are credited with originating a Southern literary renaissance. They wrote poetry and ushered in a new movement of literary criticism, named the New Criticism by Ransom. As witnesses to the rapid industrialization of the South by Northern industries, the Fugitives feared that technology would strip nature, as well as humanity, of its sensuous and contemplative qualities. Through their poetry they expressed their belief in a return to reverence for land and for human experience. For the New Critics, however, the poem was more than a means of expression; it had a mystical authority of its own, separate from the poet's intentions or the reader's interpretation.

By 1925, when Warren graduated from Vanderbilt with highest honors, the Fugitives were going their separate ways, pursuing individual interests. Warren left the South to study literature as a graduate student first at the University of California at Berkeley, then at Yale University, and finally at Oxford University in England as a Rhodes scholar. While at Oxford, Warren published his first book, a biography called John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929), about the well-known abolitionist John Brown.

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