All The Kings Men
Author Signed Limited Edition
Robert Penn Warren
1977
Franklin Library Sixty Series
| Title | All The Kings Men |
| Author | Robert Penn Warren |
| Price | Sale Price $295 | |
| Condition | Fine – with some marks to the gilt |
| Publisher | Franklin Library, Franklin Center, PA |
| Publication Date | 1977 |
| Signature | HAND SIGNED by Robert Penn Warren on 3rd free endpaper.
(Bound in-Not Tipped in) Protective tissue guard laid in over signature page |
| Collection | One of the Sixty Books in the Series of Fine Author Signed Leather Limited Editions Published by Franklin Library in the Years 1977 Through 1982. |
| Binding | Premium hand-cut rich black full leather boards with a distinct cover design in ornate 22-karat gold gild. The spine is hubbed with raised horizontal ridges formed in the leather. |
| Endpaper and Gild | Olive green silk moire endpapers. Pages are gilded to protect against dust and moisture. |
| Bookmark | Sewn-in olive green satin ribbon page marker |
| Illustrations | Jim Sharpe |
| Paper | Acid neutral paper designed to last generations without discoloring. |
Robert Penn Warren's landmark book is a loosely fictionalized account of Governor Huey Long of Louisiana, one of the nation's most astounding politicians. All the King's Men tells the story of Willie Stark, a southern-fried politician who builds support by appealing to the common man and playing dirty politics with the best of the back-room dealmakers. Though Stark quickly sheds his idealism, his right-hand man, Jack Burden -- who narrates the story -- retains it and proves to be a thorn in the new governor's side. Stark becomes a successful leader, but at a very high price, one that eventually costs him his life. The Pulitzer Prize award-winning book is a play of politics, society and personal affairs, all wrapped in the cloak of history.
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) was an American poet and novelist who was born in Guthrie, Kentucky and graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1925 and the University of California, Berkeley in 1926. He later attended Yale University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England in 1930. While still an undergraduate at Vanderbilt, he became associated with the group of poets there known as the Fugitives, and somewhat later, during the early 1930s, Warren and some of the same writers formed a group known as the Southern Agrarians. He contributed "The Briar Patch" to the Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand along with 11 other Southern writers and poets (including fellow Vanderbilt poet/critics John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson). Warren won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his best-known work, the novel All the King's Men. He won Pulitzer Prizes in poetry in 1958 for Promises: Poems 1954-1956, and in 1979 for Now and Then. All the King's Men became a very successful film in 1949.
Throughout his career, Warren made many contributions to the genres of fiction, poetry, history, literary criticism, and social commentary. He was a leader among writers of his time and was recognized for his lifelong achievements when was selected as a MacArthur Fellow and later was named the first U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry on February 26, 1986. Warren was coauthor, with Clean the Brooks, of Understanding Poetry, an influential literature textbook (which was followed by other similarly coauthored textbooks Understanding Fiction and Modern Rhetoric) written from what can be called a New Critic approach. In April of 2005, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp to mark the 100th anniversary of Penn Warren's birth. Introduced at the Post Office in his native Guthrie, it depicts the author as he appeared in a 1948 photograph, with a background scene of a political rally designed to evoke the setting of All the King's Men.
