All the King's Men

All the King's Men is a novel by the American writer Robert Penn Warren, published in 1946 and set in the Depression-era Deep South.

Willie Stark begins as an honest man from a rural county who is used by other people's factions and then learns to use everyone, and his administration is a machine built out of roads, contracts, favours and fear. Jack Burden is his assistant, and his habit of explaining other people by the things they cannot help makes him the right man for the governor's dirtiest jobs and the wrong man to be given the ones that touch his own history. The book's plot works through a set of people who are connected to each other in ways Jack only understands late: a judge, a doctor, a sister, a rejected fiancée and a cousin who is willing to be useful. Warren based the governor on Huey P. Long, who was assassinated in 1935, and took his title from the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947, was adapted into films in 1949 and 2006, and the earlier of the two won the Academy Award for Best Picture.