Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Boot Club. I'm June Thomas.

Today, our club members are discussing Robert Penn Warren's classic political novel, All the King's Men.

To introduce the conversation, here's Stephen Metcalf.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club. I'm Stephen Metcalf, Slate's critic at

large. I'm joined today by Jacob Wiesberg, Slate's editor-in-chief, Jacob. Hello, Steve. Thank

you. Yeah, great to have you here. And Julia Turner, Slate's culture editor. Hey, Julia. Hi, Steve.

Today we're going to talk about

a sprawling, challenging, messy, terrifically compelling novel called All the Kingsmen by Robert

Penn Warren. All the King's Men tells the story of Willie Stark, though we'll get to this in a

moment. In the edition, we're reading today, he's called

Willie Talos, but we'll call him Stark for now, who becomes governor of a, he's essentially

a Romanticleff version of Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana. Though, as Robert Penn

Warren was at pains to point out, this is not simply a Romano Clef and

certainly expands well beyond the career of Huey Long to tell the story of Willie Stark, who

begins as an idealist and as a bit of a dupe even. He runs for governor of his state as a

stalking horse, which he doesn't, himself doesn't understand, and only later learns that he's

been used by the

powers that be to split the vote. And along the way to coming to this piece of political

knowledge and self-knowledge, he loses his innocence, he wins the governorship by a kind of

fluke and becomes an extremely powerful. And in Robert Penn Warren's own imagination,

almost fascistic figure, this is how

Robert Penn Warren felt about Huey Long. And it's about his career in downfall. Now, paralleling that

...