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All the King's Men
All the King's Men
Aug 23, 2025 12:05 PM

Author:Robert Penn Warren

All the King's Men

All the King's Men is considered the finest novel ever written on American politics. Set in the 1930s, this book traces the rise and fall of Willie Stark, 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.

Reviews

Packed with wit.

—— Helen Dunmore , Daily Express

The best-loved book by our best-loved novelist

—— Independent

The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste

—— Virginia Woolf

Like Irvine Welsh, I am a great admirer of Jane Austen

—— Alexander McCall Smith

Another question I've been regularly asked over the past year is what models I had in mind when writing Curious Incident. Was it To Kill a Mockingbird? Was it Catcher in the Rye? In fact, the book most often in my mind was Pride and Prejudice

—— Mark Haddon

An incredibly funny, very upmarket love story with an enchanting heroine and the perfect romantic hero: a tartar with a heart of gold

—— Jilly Cooper

The Mozart opera of novels and again a transcendent union of structure and content in which unhappy marriage is the reward for those who show a weakness of character and lifelong happiness is a province reserved only for those "who truly know themselves"

—— Kate Atkinson

For those of us who suspect all the mysteries of life are contained in the microcosm of the family, that personal relationships prefigure all else, the work of Jane Austen is the Rosetta Stone of literature

—— Anna Quindlen

How could these novels ever seem remote...the gaiety is unextinguished today, the irony has kept its bite, the reasoning is still sweet, the sparkle undiminished, as comedies they are irresistibly and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be

—— Eudora Welty

That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements of feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with

—— Sir Walter Scott

The most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its author's works

—— George Saintsbury (1894)

A delicate meditation on mortality, decay and the fading of beauty

—— Martin Sixsmith , The Week

Historical fiction at its best

—— Orlando Figes , The Week

No novel is perfect, but this small, wonderfully atmospheric and immensely poignant story...comes very close

—— Sunday Times, *Summer Reads of 2021*
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