Author: Robert Penn Warren

Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics

First published:1946

Setting: Louisiana, USA
Read in December 2013

My Rating ★★★★  4.2

My Waterstones Review

“A political classic, no longer politically correct”

Robert Penn Warren won a Pulitzer prize (1947) for this long novel and two years later the film won three Academy Awards, it doesn’t disappoint. While the main thrust of the book is following the political life of Willie Stark “the boss” who becomes Governor of Louisiana, it is equally about the narrator Jack Burden, a journalist and a sort of “fixer” for Willie. The book has a number of themes love (and affairs), family, race, slavery, education, alcohol, religion and of course politics. The novel is not written linearly and asks the reader to do a bit of time traveling, which can be confusing. Don’t be put off by today’s politically incorrect language as this is a classic written more than 65 years ago – times have changed.

Book Review

Robert Penn Warren won a Pulitzer Prize (1947) for this novel. It was made into a film in 1949 (winner of 3 Academy Awards and nominated in 4 other categories) and also in 2006. It is written in the first person, Jack Burden is a journalist and fixer for “the Boss” Governor Willie Stark. We follow the life of Willie from a “play by the book” lawyer who is respected for his anti-corruption stance through to his ultimate demise, in politics you cannot always play with a straight bat.

This is a great book with a number of themes, love (and affairs), family, race, slavery, education, alcohol, religion and politics. It is loosley based on Huey Pierce Long Jr, a Governor of Louisiana and a member of the United States Senate until he was assassinated. You will find on the first page that it uses politically incorrect language in today’s terms but this should not spoil the enjoyment of reading this long book.

The book jumps back and forth in time and this can be a bit confusing. The present is 1936 but we start with a journey remembered back three years earlier and Jack soon recollects the time when he first met Willie Stark in 1922. In Chapter 4 we are thrown even further back in time, pre-Civil War, when slavery was rife in the middle of the 19th Century, this chapter seems a little redundant with the rest of the book. While the book is considered as a political story, we are also following the developing relationships between Jack, his mother and father, and the fellow residents of Burden’s Landing, Judge Irwin, and his childhood friends Anne and Adam Stanton. Will Jack and Anne eventually get together?