An Election Season Read, or Re-Read as the Case May Be

Today's issue of The New York Times has an article noting that Robert Penn Warren's classic political novel, "All the King's Men," is still a great read 70 years after it was first published.

"I reread “All the King’s Men” recently, in the wake of the Ohio and Florida primaries," said Dwight Garner, author of the piece. "It remains a salty, living thing. There’s no need for literary or political pundits to bring in the defibrillators. It is also eerily prescient, in its portrait of the rise of a demagogue, about some of the dark uses to which language has been put in this year’s election."


Penn Warren's story is told by a memorable character named Jack Burden, a former political reporter who, as his name suggests, feels highly conflicted as he helps a southern lawyer named Willie Stark turn politician and run successfully for governor.

”Burden’s crucial observation, early in the novel, is that Stark needs to stop droning about policy in his speeches and start stirring up the animals," Garner said.

Sound familiar?

I first read "All the King's Men," which won a Pulitzer Prize, late in high school or early in college and thought it was the best book I had ever read.

A couple of years later, when I was president of a group of college residence halls, we had a guest-in-residence program and I suggested to my roommate, who was running it, that we invite Robert Penn Warren. He consulted with the woman who ran the university's speaker program and she told him we couldn't because the author was dead. If Penn Warren was who we first wanted and he wasn't available, we should turn to Cleanth Brooks, she said.


I was at the time more or less majoring in student politics while getting a degree in General Engineering with a focus on the then-emerging field of computers. I had never heard of Dr. Brooks and was pretty sure hardly anyone else had either, but time was short so my roommate contacted him and he agreed to come.

To my surprise, he was a big hit -- overflow crowds attended the sessions he gave -- and at the end of his second day (he was booked for three) he told me something along the lines of: "I feel like a squeezed lemon. I'm not sure I have anything more to offer."

It was only decades later that the scales fell off my eyes. Penn Warren and Brooks were the leading lights of "New Criticism," an innovative way of examining literature -- particularly poetry -- that focused on the text itself as opposed to the background of the author or the historical period in which a work had been written or set. Both men were from the South and for a time, they worked closely together.

As we later discovered, Penn Warren had actually been very much alive when I had wanted him as our guest and he went on to live another 15 years or so. But that was well before the days of the Internet, which allows one to find out more or less instantly whether a prominent individual is still around.

While Penn Warren is now definitely deceased, his most famous creation lives on. I highly recommend it.