Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men: A Reader’s Companion by Jonathan S. Cullick

Abstract

Reviewed by: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men: A Reader’s Companion by Jonathan S. Cullick Anne E. Marshall Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men: A Reader’s Companion. By Jonathan S. Cullick. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018. Pp. xvi, 124. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8131-7592-8.) The Kentucky Humanities Council chose Robert Penn Warren’s brilliant, but famously challenging, novel All the King’s Men (1946) as the 2018–2019 featured [End Page 953] book for its yearlong “Kentucky Reads” initiative. The council, in partnership with the University Press of Kentucky, commissioned Jonathan S. Cullick, a professor of English at Northern Kentucky University, to author a guide to help the reading public navigate and think about the novel. It is a task for which Cullick, a scholar of Robert Penn Warren and the literature of the U.S. South, is well suited. As Cullick tells us, All the King’s Men was a logical selection for “Kentucky Reads” not only because Warren had Kentucky roots, but also because the novel speaks so directly to the current political moment. While Cullick does not draw them extensively or explicitly, there are clear parallels between the novel’s main character, Willie Stark, the literary epitome of a populist demagogue, and more than a few contemporary state and national politicians. Stark’s inflammatory rhetorical style, which plays to the fears and sense of alienation of his constituents rather than to their intellect, should certainly seem familiar to modern readers. Accordingly, Cullick has organized this book around the question: “How is All the King’s Men relevant in our time, decades after its publication?” (p. xiv). He has taken a couple of approaches to answering it. One is to consult public figures themselves. In the process of writing this reader’s companion, he reached out to dozens of state lawmakers, university presidents, and other public officials to get their take on when they encountered Warren’s novel and how it shaped their political mentality. He also considers the relative merits of the film and theater adaptations of the novel. Other chapters feel like traditional, but still very accessible, literary criticism. In them, Cullick examines other political themes from the novel, including the role of rhetoric, the corrupting nature of power, and the uneasy relationship between pragmatism and idealism. There is also an appendix containing provocative questions that would be useful in any group discussion. Cullick’s research and commentary will help readers form their own insights for what Warren’s novel has to tell readers about the nature of contemporary politics. In the end, however, he notes that the book has as much to say about the responsibility of citizens living within a democracy as it does their leaders. After all, demagogues can only succeed with the help of voters. As Cullick asserts, “The support and the votes that we citizens possess belong to us; they are ours to give or withhold freely. We must hold leaders accountable, of course, but we must also hold ourselves accountable” (p. 85). In order to vote well, we must be “mindful of our own needs and our own vulnerabilities to political candidates who appeal to those needs” (p. 85). This slim volume fulfills its purpose of helping readers navigate All the King’s Men. It is a testament to both the importance of the public intellectual service that humanities faculty perform and the invaluable role that university presses play in the intellectual health of the states in which they operate. Anne E. Marshall Mississippi State University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association