Rapida ascesa al potere e rovinosa caduta, nell’America degli anni Trenta, del governatore Willie Talos, un bifolco eletto da bifolchi che appendono le sue gigantografie alle pareti dei bar con sotto la scritta “Il mio verbo è il cuore del Popolo”. Il tutto visto attraverso gli occhi del suo amico e stretto collaboratore Jack Burden, che intreccia la storia del governatore con il racconto della sua vita, della sua personale lotta contro i fantasmi del passato e i problemi del presente.

“Hai un meraviglioso senso dell’umorismo,” disse Anne.
“Dove andiamo?” le chiesi, senza badare al suo commento.
“Sei un saccentone strafottente.”
“Dove andiamo?”
“Non cresci mai, vero?”
“Dove andiamo?”
Vagavamo senza meta, oltrepassando le porte a vento di locali e oyster bar, i chioschi dei giornali e le vecchiette che vendevano fiori. Comprai delle gardenie e le regalai a Anne, poi le dissi: “Ammetto di essere un saccentone strafottente, ma è solo un modo per ammazzare il tempo”.

Non è un brutto romanzo, anzi, ma le mie aspettative erano alte. E’ un romanzo così così, con un inizio fulminante. Le prime cento pagine catturano l’attenzione, poi la lettura prosegue tra alti e bassi. Dialoghi serrati e situazioni descritte bene, ma spesso le riflessioni debordano, i ragionamenti si fanno contorti. Forse il problema è proprio la voce del narratore, Jack Burden, questo saccentone strafottente che a tratti diventa molto verboso, affidandosi a frasi che si ampliano a dismisura. Le similitudini ad effetto si sprecano, anche tre per pagina, tipo: All’interno si sentì una specie di rumore, come la nota profonda di un oboe soffocata da un barile di piume.
Oppure: La stagione somigliava quel giorno alla bella figlia prosperosa di un mezzadro sciancato, una ragazza con i seni debordanti e la vita mozzafiato, le guance rosse, gli occhi luminosi e un filo di sudore alla radice dei capelli color fieno (che da altre parti chiamerebbero biondo platino), ma che appena la guardate sapete già che nel giro di poco sarà solo un mucchio di ossa e cartilagini, con una faccia da strega come un vecchio falcetto arrugginito.

Un romanzo americano, molto americano, pure troppo. Vincitore del Pulitzer nel 1947, candidato a Delusione dell’Anno nel 2020.

Ok......What did i think?? I wish I had read this book a loooooooooooongggggg time ago....... but maybe it was time to read it now. I think every American , whether Democrat, Republican, Independent, or I don't give a shit party, should read it..... It's a very modern topical novel to read now about how corruption can ruin a person,because we have to be right about everything........ instead of trying to work together for the better welfare of

"everyone" in this country.


It's a book that makes you realize not one way of thinking is correct. That being closed minded is the wrong path to take, that being a politician is not easy,and it's not necessarily rewarding,and it changes you into a person that maybe you don't really want to be. So many people say and act a certain way because they are afraid of what others think, but may act differently when left to their own devices..... to me that's what this novel points out.....at times the details were tedious, but then those details played a major role in the plot later.....as the plot thickened.


I came away from this novel relieved it was finally over, but then again sad to see it end. I see myself reading it again someday.

I also found myself laughing outloud quite often at the humor,and the way southern people act..... cause this is a southern story,but it's sentiments hit all of us......


That is why I consider this , up to this point in life, of what I have read thus far, the greatest American political novel that I've ever read.

Bravo, Robert! I wish you were still alive so I could attend your booksigning, and shake your hand....cause, dude....you rock!


Read it!

Jack Burden is one of my favorite characters. He hovers as a reflection of what could've been, yet his finality terrifies me. The scenes detailing Burden smoking in the dark and the winds arriving from the Canadian north are amazing. Warren eyes both Faulkner and Gibbon. His study of power echoes the Bard, though his poetic flourishes are native-born. He eyes his betters and replicates to placate Carson and Marsa Bill. All The Kings Men is regarded as the best example of the political novel. I'm not convinced by those hazy parameters. Warren looks at Time. He ponders Power. History remains as volatile as a Southern river. Sometimes the levees need to be dynamited for the common good, or at least to benefit those in peak tax brackets. Warren reveals that every Icon has greasy fingers, the task is to uncover such.

"Red" Warren was a friend of my doctoral advisor Leonard Unger, I think from the Vanderbilt connection before they were U Minnesota colleagues in the 50's, along with Saul Bellow and Allen Tate. Of course, Warren was known for the most famous poetry introduction ever written, Brooks and Warren, and Leonard's reading of poems built on it with an added soupçon of Catskill wit. After B&W came Brower's fine Fields of Light, which lay behind my Amherst College lit intro. The Amherst approach contrasted to Warren's finding a poem's "meaning," by emphasizing "an active tentativeness" in the classroom with mutual engagement of lit, the phrase from my mentor Bill Pritchard. (My Amherst Shakespeare prof Baird said, "Here all I've been told is how wrong we were [Brower and Barber and Baird and Craig}, but when Brower went to Harvard, and invented Hum 6, he became much-awarded.") But I digress.

King's Men is a fine novel, probably very relevant in this Year of the Cock [Chinese, but also our political leader]. Perhaps if I reread it, I'd add the last star. I withold it because as a political novel, it may not equal, say, Oliver Twist or even FM Ford's The Good Soldier or A Man Could Stand Up, or Mailer's Catch-22 or Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five or Proulx's Shipping News (though set among Newfies, really about the US) or even the other great Newfoundland novel, Johnston's the Colony of Unrequited Love. Since my specialty has been drama, I have never taught these novels in the same course, so perhaps I err. I cannot now find King's Men on my shelf, though I know what the jacket looks like, and where it was for decades, Modern Library, 1953, seven years after its first appearance.

The frank, offensive racist language, a discouraging reminder to read, may be preferable to the veiled racism we now see behind the victory of the Clown Prince, who may be our first prez with certifiable mental illness, evidently "Malignant Narcisissism" analyzed by Dr. Otto Kernberg (Cornell Med) in 1984. (Seems to me Kim Jung Un may also suffer from it. A dangerous twain to meet.)
Red Warren's first few pages are a tour de force of the American motoring and working experience, and the sawmill's wasting of the pine forest until all the work is gone, and the long cycle, the forty year softwood tree cycle, the economic cyle now interrupted by robots. But Willie Stark will make America great... As Red Warren wrote of the Boss in his first version of Ch 1, "The real son-of-a-bitch is the rarest work of God." That's what the US apparently voted for in Nov 2016, but now they're finding what makes a Sobakievich (the Russian for that rarest work) makes a miserable and cruel leader.

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption.

When I first started this read, I wasn’t sure I was going to mesh with Warren’s prose style as his sentences are lengthy and simile-filled. It took me a good 1/3 of the book to really get a grasp of it and come to appreciate his poetic and lavish descriptions. But once that occurred for me, it was a matter of finding the time to get to the story without the distractions of life getting in the way this month. I was enamored with the story of Willie Stark and Jack Burden, the politician and his assistant. What I assumed was to be the story of the politician’s rise and fall became the self-searching and coming to grips with the past of the assistant. Warren took each man’s stories and interconnected them with intricacies and minute details that left this reader in amazement. So much so that I’ve already placed this book on my “must reread” someday list. In no way do I feel that I can really write a review that could explain it’s merit.

Willie Stark, the “Boss”, championed the common man and considered himself a man of the people. He was an excellent orator and spoke directly to the people in a language they understood. His story is one of poverty to success in politics and one in which his methods of getting things done suddenly turned to manipulation as he learned the tricks of the trade which lead to power- scheming, betraying, seducing, out-dealing, blackmailing. It became instinctual.

In contrast, Jack Burden’s powerful story unfolds as he attempts to find himself in the midst of his complex background from a well-connected family that masks much of its dysfunction. The former history student and newspaper columnist does the digging and dirty work for Stark but finds himself confronted with the knowledge of a secret from the past that hits very close to home for him. He struggles with the deceitfulness of his position and tries to come to grips with the realities of past events and present tragedies.

This has been the story of Willie Stark. But it is my story too.

This is more than a story of politics but it certainly brings to light what can happen to those close to one who’s appetite for ambition and power overtake his idea of right and good. It is also a story of personal responsibility and coming to terms with the past. Through Burden’s narration we witness the transformations and evolutions of these two men as well as several other characters who play important roles in the story. Burden’s childhood friends, Anne and Adam Stanton are brilliantly interconnected with Stark and Burden. The storytelling is intense and the chapters are extra-long and non-chronological. The timeline changes don’t jar the storyline but demonstrate just how deftly Warren is at his craft of weaving the stories and lives together.

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future.

A Pulitzer Prize winner for 1947, Warren’s novel stands the test of time and reads like a modern story. The timelessness of the topics are such that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Corruption, ambition, power - we just can’t seem to get away from these themes today.

Δε μπορώ να καυχηθω ότι κατανόησα πλήρως όλα τα νοήματα του βιβλίου αλλά δε μπορώ και να μη δώσω τα 5 αστέρια που του αξίζουν και με το παραπάνω! Κάθε παράγραφος είναι ένα έργο τέχνης τοσο από λογοτεχνική πλευρά όσο και από πλευρά νοημάτων. Ο Γουιλι Σταρκ είναι ο άξονας με βάση τον οποίο προσδιορίζονται τα υπόλοιπα πρόσωπα του βιβλίου, ανάμεσα τους και οΤζακ Μπερντεν, ο κεντρικός αφηγητής. Δεν είναι και το πιο εύκολο ανάγνωσμα αλλά δε γίνεται να το διαβάσεις και να μην κάνεις την ενδοσκόπηση σου . Για μένα η ουσία του βιβλίου συμπυκνώνεται στην εξής φράση :

«Αν δεν αποδεχτεί κάνεις το παρελθόν του και το φορτίο του,δεν υπάρχει μέλλον,γιατί χωρίς το ένα δεν μπορεί να υπάρξει το άλλο,και αν μπορέσεις να αποδεχτείς το παρελθόν,μπορείς να ελπίζεις για το μέλλον»

Σπουδαίο έργο,σπουδαίος συγγραφέας.

Kentucky-born 20th-century American writer and major academic literary critic Robert Penn Warren is still the only writer ever to have won the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction (for this 1946 novel) and poetry. Both a graduate of, and later a teacher at, Vanderbilt Univ. in Nashville, in the 1930s he was a part of the Southern Agrarians, a circle of Southern literary intellectuals centered around that university, and was one of the contributors, along with others in the group, to its 1930 manifesto of anti-capitalist conservatism, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (which I've never read, but hope to eventually). Back in 1971, having learned about this group and having my interest piqued from reading The Conservative Tradition in America, I chose this novel for my book report in American Literature II as a college freshman. Although more than 50 years have elapsed since then, and I don't have a copy in front of me, I still recall it vividly enough to do it justice, in the sort of informal review that we ordinary readers share with each other here.

I've shelved this as "political fiction" (that is, fiction which is set in the world of politics). Set in 1930s Louisiana (he also taught for a time at Louisiana State Univ., so he was familiar with the life and culture of the state, including its politics), the book takes as its titular "King" a fictional governor of the state, Willie Stark. Aspects of Stark's personality and career are recognizably modeled on real-life Louisiana politician Huey "Kingfish" Long (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long ). However, Stark is not a carbon-copy clone of Long, and not the protagonist of the novel, though he's a major character. The actual protagonist, and maker of the central moral decisions here, is his young press agent, Jack Burden. But political programs and ideology as such aren't Warren's focus here. Rather, his major concerns are moral, philosophical, and even spiritual.

To the extent that there is a message about politics here, it's in keeping with those concerns. Willie Stark began his political career as an honest idealist who wanted to serve the interests of the people of his state. The seduction of power molded him into a corrupt demagogue who's only serving himself. Warren's not as interested in evaluating Stark's political program as in evaluating what his quest for power, and his rationalizations of all the shady machinations and mistreatments of other people that are part of that quest, is doing and has done to him as a person, and what it's doing to his henchmen -and to warn us that this sort of temptation is endemic in political life. But more broadly, he's also posing the questions of what matters most in life, whether right and wrong are real moral categories, and whether it's possible for a person to alter the direction of his/her life for the better. How Jack Burden will ultimately answer those questions is what the reader wants to find out. And while Warren wasn't necessarily a professing Christian, one of his characters here is a preacher who exercises some influence on Jack, and whose message is treated positively.

Racial relations aren't a focus here; they're touched on only peripherally. But Jack and some other characters at times use the n-word casually (which, sadly, did reflect realistic speech in that time and place), and there's also a passing narrative reference to black laborers as "darkies." This is obviously offensive to most readers, including me. Warren can be fairly criticized for this, and for the fact that the essay he contributed to the I'll Take My Stand collection was a defense of the noxious policies of racial segregation that prevailed in the Jim Crow South of that day. But my evaluation of the book overall recognizes positives that counterbalance the racial insensitivity. And to Warren's credit, he did rethink his attitude toward blacks, finally decisively repudiating segregation in a landmark Life magazine article in 1956, and went on to be a strong voice for racial integration and reconciliation. (In that respect, I would say that rather than rejecting his paleo-conservative beliefs, he became a more consistent exponent of their biblical roots.)

Very conflicted between 4 and 5 stars. Terrific story, memorable characters, smooth writing. Poetic, dark, meaningful. Reminds me (oddly enough) of D.H. Lawrence and Hermann Hesse.

Ένα κορυφαίο μυθιστόρημα το οποίο φέρει πολλές ομοιότητες με το αριστούργημα του Όρσον Ουέλς, "Ο Πολίτης Κέιν".
Η λογοτεχνία στα καλύτερά της.

All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren

All the King's Men is a novel by Robert Penn Warren first published in 1946. Its title is drawn from the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. In 1947, Warren won the Pulitzer Prize for All the King's Men. It was adapted for a film in 1949 and 2006; the 1949 version won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It is rated as the 36th greatest novel of the 20th century by Modern Library, and it was chosen as one of Time magazine's 100 best novels.

All the King's Men portrays the dramatic and theatrical political rise and governorship of Willie Stark, a cynical, liberal populist in the American South during the 1930's. The novel is narrated by Jack Burden, a political reporter who comes to work as Governor Stark's right-hand man. The trajectory of Stark's career is interwoven with Jack Burden's life story and philosophical reflections: "the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story."

تاریخ خوانش نسخه اصلی: روز یازدهم سال2007میلادی

عنوان: همه مردان پادشاه؛ نویسنده رابرت پن وارن ؛ مترجم: یوسف سلیمان‌ سالم؛ تهران: نشر تیسا، سال 1397؛ در570ص؛ شابک9786006662046؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20م

کتاب «تمام مردان شاه» اثری از: «رابرت پن وارن» است؛ برای نخستین بار در سال1946میلادی منتشر شده، و عنوان آن برگرفته از اشعار کودکان، و شعری به نام «هامتی دامتی» است؛ در سال1947میلادی «وارن» برای نگارش این کتاب، «جایزه ی پولیتزر» را به دست آوردند، از این کتاب فیلم‌هایی در سال1949میلادی و سال2006میلادی اقتباس شده اند، فیلم نسخه ی سال1949میلادی این اثر، برنده ی جایزه ی اسکار بهترین فیلم سال شد، کتاب به عنوان سی و ششمین اثر برگزیده، از بهترین رمان‌های سده ی بیستم میلادی از سوی کتابخانه ی مدرن برگزیده شد، مجله ی «تایم» این کتاب را به عنوان یکی از صد رمان برتر پس از سال1923میلادی برگزید

این کتاب «رابرت پن وارن» بر اساس یک سری از ماجراهای راستین نگاشته شده، و نویسنده با الهام گرفتن از آن ماجراها که شامل زندگی یکی از سیاستمداران عوامگرای «جنوب آمریکا»، به نام «ویلی استارک» در طول دهه ی1930میلادی است، راوی این داستان شخصی است به نام «جک بوردن»، یک خبرنگار سیاسی، که آمده تا به عنوان دست راست فرمانده «استارک»، و در کنار او کار کند، مسیر زندگی حرفه‌ ای و سیاسی «استارک» با داستان «جک بوردن» بازتابی فلسفی به خود گرفته، و به گونه‌ ای شامل دو داستان شده، داستان «ویلی استارک» و داستان «جک بوردن» در یک معنای کلی، کتاب به شکلی بازتاب کننده ی کارهای اخیر «رابرت پن وارن» است ایشان مدعی بودند که که کتاب «همه ی مردان شاه» از دید او کتابی نیست که درباره ی سیاست باشد

تاریخ نخستین خوانش 18/03/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 20/02/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 and is the work for which Warren is most known. He also received the Pulitzer for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. I read this one at the beginning of this month. This is an absolutely fine novel with some gorgeous, thoughtful, and insightful writing. It's got morality and ethics and how it ties into politics and how flawed we are as human beings even as we're trying to reach some depth in our characters.

Warren probes the characters of Willie Stark, the politician, and Jack, the narrator, who works for Willie. I don't always like Jack, but for the most part, Warren enables me to understand him. Jack comes across as a fish in Willie Stark's net; he doesn't have enough steam to swim against Stark's current. As for Stark, the quote "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" comes to mind.

Penn's style of writing is what held me to this novel. He can bend a simile to do his bidding and polish it with stardust. I was riveted.

The moonlight lay on the slightly ruffling water like a swath of brilliant white, cold fire. You expected to see that white fire start eating out over the whole ocean the way fire in a sage field spreads. But it lay there glittering and flickering in a broad nervous swath reaching out yonder to the bright horizon blur.

I felt like I was setting down to a feast with prose like this. Gorgeous and vivid imagery burst into my mind with color, painting a picture that often brought with it an emotional effect.

His straightforward prose was just as effective.

Just as I climbed in beside Sugar-Boy, in the place the Boss always took, I heard the burst of music from the apartment house. The window was open and the music was very loud. Adam was beating the hell out of that expensive piano, and filling the night air with racket like Niagara Falls.

The above sentence followed a tension filled scene that made me feel like I'd just tumbled out of the OK Corral.

Throw in a little philosophy:

For Life is Motion toward Knowledge. If God is Complete Knowledge, then He is Complete Non-Motion, which is Non-Life, which is Death. Therefore, if there is such a God of Fullness of Being, we would worship Death, the Father. That was what I said to the old man, who had looked at me across the papers and fouled dishes, and his red-streaked eyes had blinked above the metal-rimmed spectacles, which had hung down on the end of his nose.

And you've got a mighty fine novel.

This is a sensational, provocative read. This is one of the deepest, most profound, and insightful books I've ever read. Warren's glimpse into the soul of man is gripping and soul-stirring.

The book is the story of Jack Burden. His tale is his burden and telling it, much like the Mariner retelling his tale in Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." They both make a kind of penance in telling their tale of woe.

Burden's tale, though, is a tale not only of his own sin, but of the web of generational sin spun around him by his parents, and further developed by himself as a younger man. I cannot tell too much, for it would ruin the drama of the story to tell of how Warren weaves his story and makes it all come together in a breathtaking kind of way--where everything is connected and everything is loaded with significance.

Jack undergoes several transformations through his tale. He recounts much of his youth, even giving an thirty page interlude on a long-dead relative that is good enough to have been a novel of its own. The transformations alter the way Burden views the world around him and the people in his life.

The fates of both Jack Burden and Willie (The Boss) Stark are interwoven, and the story revolves around how everyone else in the story relates to these two characters.

I've hardly done justice to the book, to do so, would spoil it. This is a first-rate book and it is obvious why it was worthy of receiving the Pulitzer Prize. Warren is an amazingly gifted writer. It isn't just a good story, but Warren's way of telling it will take your breath away. This is simply one of the best of the best.