All the King's Men is a 460 page classic novel of American literature written by the distinguished poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren and first published in 1946. It is written from the point of view of Jack Burden, the chief staff person of a controversial governor of a southern state, and it focuses on the themes of political corruption, class conflict, and dissolute love.
The unfolding of the conflict portrays a clash between a self-serving drive for populist political power and the bitter defensiveness of established class and family pride. The political assassination at the climax is loosely based on that of the Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long. According to the author in his introduction, "the basic scheme and metaphor for the whole novel" centers on the moral order: "All of the main characters are violators of nature."
