The Book Club

All The King’s Men and All The Festival’s Readers:
Be a Part of the Inaugural Program of the Louisiana Book Festival’s Book Club

Drawing upon the overwhelmingly positive responses to communal reading endeavors at national, regional, and local levels, the Louisiana Book Festival is pleased to inaugurate as part of this year’s events the Louisiana Book Festival Book Club, a program to become an annual special event that invites participants to read a common text that explores key elements of Louisiana’s rich literature, history, and heritage and, in book club fashion, to discuss that text as a group as part of the state’s annual literary celebration.

This year that text will be Robert Penn Warren’s brilliant 1946 fictionalization of Louisiana politics, All the King’s Men. Based upon the turbulent era of Huey Long, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel grew out of Warren’s years in Baton Rouge teaching at Louisiana State University and is the intricate intertwined tale of Willie Stark, an ill-fated governor who rises from humble roots to both success and corruption, and Jack Burden, one of Willie’s pensive assistants forced to ponder the potential meanings of this gripping rise and fall. A magnificent work of prose rivaling in depth and sweep the masterpieces of William Faulkner, All the King’s Men remains, according to most literary scholars, the definitive novel of American politics.

Having secured and read Warren’s saga on their own before the festival, participants will then have the opportunity to discuss their insights and reactions with one another during a seventy-five-minute discussion that will take place from 10 AM to 11:15 AM on Saturday, October 4, in House Committee Room 1 of the Louisiana State Capitol, the fictionalized setting of Stark’s fatal assassination. Dr. Gary Richards, scholar of twentieth-century southern fiction and longtime facilitator in the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ Readings in Literature and Culture library program, will lead the discussion.

Because space is limited to 75, festival goers who wish to participate in the group discussion should register before the event by calling Sharonne Primus at (225) 342-4926 or e-mailing sprimus@state.lib.la.us. Seating for anyone not registered will only be available after those previously registered are seated as class size permits. Registrants should arrive by 9:45 a.m. and bring their confirmation letter to secure their reservation.  Seating will be open to the general public once registrants are seated.

Participants should be aware that, although scholar Noel Polk has edited a “restored” version of the novel, the festival’s discussion will be based upon the 1946 published version, that which circulated throughout the twentieth century and won Warren such acclaim. That edition, published by Harcourt, has the ISBN of 978-0156004800 and is easily available in bookstores, at libraries, and online.

Discussion leader Dr. Gary Richards is the author of Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936-1961 as well as numerous articles on twentieth- and twenty-first-century southern fiction and drama. He currently teaches U.S. and southern literature and culture, sexuality studies, and literary theory at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.