WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE The fully restored original text of the classic, ever-relevant story of a backcountry lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power—American literature's definitive political novel. All the King's Men traces the rise of fall of demagogue Willie Talos, a fiction Southern policitian who resembles the real-life Huey Long of Louisiana. Talos begins his career as an idealistic man of the people, but he soon becomes corrupted by success and the lust for power. Now Warren's masterpiece has been fully restored and reintroduced by literary scholar Noel Polk, textual editor of the works of William Faulkner. Polk presents the novel as it was originally written, revealing even greater energy, excitement, and complexity. PRAISE FOR ALL THE KING'S MEN "Over the course of more than two centuries of vivid political history, there is perhaps only one full-blooded American novel of politics that plunges deep into the hearts of its characters and therefore into the hearts of its readers, thus rising to the top ranks of American fiction. That is Robert Penn Warren's lush All the King's Men." - L O S A N G E L E S T I M E S B O O K R E V I E W "It's a measure of the enduring worth of All the King's Men that Willie Stark has entered our collective literary consciousness, in the company of Captain Ahab, Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield, Rabbit Angstrom, and very few others." - J O Y C E C A R O L O A T E S , T H E N E W Y O R K R E V I E W O F B O O K S "A fully restored American political classic. . . . Now we can read it as it was written." -- Chicago Tribune Winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize, All the King's Men is one of the most famous and widely read works in American literature, and as relevant today as it was fifty years ago. Now it has been fully restored and reintroduced by literary scholar Noel Polk, textual editor of the works of William Faulkner. Polk presents the novel as it was originally written, revealing even greater energy, excitement, complexity, and subtlety of character in this landmark of letters. "[Polk] should be commended for this restored edition of Warren's great novel. . . . Deeply imagined, beautifully written, [ All the King's Men ] is both a reckoning with the deepest forces of life and an edge-of-your seat page-turner."-- The Raleigh News and Observer "To read [ All the King's Men ] in this new edition is to be struck again by its raw power, its urgency and relevance."-- New Orleans Times-Picayune "The publication of a new, corrected edition of All the King's Men is welcome news for all who care about American literature." -- Joseph Blotner, author of Robert Penn Warren: A Biography Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), America's first Poet Laureate, won three Pulitzer Prizes and virtually every other major award given to U.S. writers. Noel Polk is a professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. He lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Credits A Harvest Book Harcourt, Inc. 525 B Street, San Diego, CA 92101 15 East 26th Street, New York, NY 10010 www.HarcourtBooks.com 0902 0-15-601295-2 Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) won three Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the National Medal for Literature, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1986 he was named the country’s first poet laureate. MASON CITY. To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don't quit staring at that line and don't take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you'll hypnotize yourself and you'll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you'll try to jerk her back on but you can't because the slab is high like a curb, and maybe you'll try to reach to turn off the ignition just as she starts the dive. But you won't make it, of course. Then a nigger chopping cotton a mile away, he'll look up and see the little column of black smoke standing up above the vitriolic, arsenical green of the cotton rows, and up against the violent, metallic, throbbing blue of the sky, and he'll say, "Lawd God, hit's a-nudder one done done hit!" And the next nigger down the next row, he'll say, "Lawd God," and the first nigger will giggle, and the hoe will lift again and the blade will flash in the sun like a heliograph. Then a few days later the boys from the Highway Department will mark the spot with a little metal square on a metal rod stuck in the black dirt off the shoulder, the metal square painted white and on it in black a skull and cr