All the King's Men
The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.
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9recommend
9mentions
9people
2009–2026years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Tangentially, if you enjoy The Great Gatsby, you might also enjoy All The King's Men, which is a work of fiction that I think similarly richly described a swath of the American experience.
As for Gatsby, I think it's a great piece of fiction that invites a lot of readings, and everyone's invited to that ownership of the text. I think you can come away with the deeply shallow understanding of "the twenties were cool," and still be enriched by Fitzgerald's writing style.
I don't think anyone has made a good film adaptation of Gatsby and I don't know if anyone will, as long as it's adapted literally. The imagery and iconography of wealthy 1920s America eats so much of anything that tries to adapt it, that they tend to come out feeling shallow, and the writing is so dense that dialogue feels stilted and weird spoken out loud. You'd either need to, in my opinion, lean heavily into both, or abandon both, to make a good adaptation (leaning into both immediately feels like a Wes Anderson movie to me).
I think the best adaptation would be to do something like Jobs, where they just take a few scenes from the book and create a movie out of that.
- Yes, I second this. That was an absolutely critical read for me.
As an aside, All The King's Men and All The President's Men are books I recommend too.
- For a very literary novel on a dubious populist politician, read All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren.
- "All The King's Men," Robert Penn Warren's fictionalized treatment of Huey Long, is magnificent.
- Don't know about changing my life, but these books changed the way i look at things:
The Tao of Pooh: Benjamin Hoff
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut
TI 99/4a basic reference manual
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson, Sussman
Object Oriented Analysis and Design by Grady Booch
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
Thieves in the Night by Arthur Koestler
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
War and Peace by L.N.Tolstoy
Chapaev and the void by Pelevin
- There's a beautiful passage in All The King's Men that makes, to me, a similar point:
"The friend of your youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you...and perhaps he never saw you. What he saw was simply part of the furniture of the wonderful opening world. Friendship was something he suddenly discovered and had to give away as a recognition of and payment for the breathlessly opening world which momently divulged itself like a moon flower. It didn’t matter a damn to whom he gave it, for the fact of giving was what mattered, and if you happened to be handy you were automatically endowed with all the appropriate attributes of a friend and forever after your reality is irrelevant.”
