All The King's Men

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

“All the King’s Men, the best American political novel ever written, is generally read as a cautionary tale about how power poisons slowly, like arsenic, or cynicism. But it’s also a fable about history, and why, like poetry, it’s so hard to write it fast." -Jill Lepore

Robert Penn Warren’s masterpiece follows the career of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power.

Set in the 1930s, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel traces the rise and fall of demagogue Willie Stark, a fictional character who resembles the real-life Huey "Kingfish" Long of Louisiana. Stark begins his political career as an idealistic man of the people but soon becomes corrupted by success. As relevant today as it was eighty years ago, All the King's Men is one of the classics of American literature.