Volume 49, Number 5 · March 28, 2002
'All the King's Men'—A Case of Misreading?
By Joyce Carol Oates
All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren, restored edition edited by Noel Polk
Harcourt, 656 pp., $30.00
Like Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (1946) has come to be read as an emblematic, even an allegorical, text. The idealistic Carol Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, the romantic-minded and doomed Jay Gatsby (formerly James Gatz of North Dakota), and the charismatic Southern politician Willie Stark have acquired the status of American archetypes, larger than the historically precise fictional worlds they inhabit; like outsized farcical-heroic figures in a painting by the American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, they are more interesting for what they represent than for what they are.
Review, 5960 words
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