Willie Stark and the Long, Thinning Shadow of Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men": American Politics and the New Populism

Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men is not only the best serious novel about politics ever written in America, but also a triumph of the High Modernist imagination. As the plot line unrolls, one is forced to confront a world in which that which must happen, cannot; and conversely, that which cannot happen, must. Pinsker claims that what he has described is nothing more nor less than tragedy, one's most religious genre because it insists that suffering leads to insight and bloodshed to purification.