Robert Penn Warren — All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren taught at LSU from 1934 to 1942, the years Huey Long's presence defined Louisiana politics, and wrote *All the King's Men* in the shadow of Long's capitol. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 and is widely considered the greatest American political novel. Willie Stark is a thinly veiled Huey Long, and the capitol hallways Warren walked are the ones you can visit today. Warren co-founded *The Southern Review* at LSU during this period, still one of the most important literary journals in America. The Hill Memorial Library on campus holds Warren's papers and first editions—the archive of a writer who turned Louisiana's formative political catastrophe into American literature's most searching interrogation of power and complicity.