Luke, I am your father
I recently spent some fun time in New Orleans. It was my first trip to Louisiana, so I thought I might read up a bit. High on the list of recommended books is Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men , so that was my first, and since it's pretty long (656 pg) it took several evenings, etc. It has some structural similarities to a couple of other books I've been thinking about lately, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In each case the story is told by a narrator but the central character, part man and part myth, is often offstage. That central character in ATKM is Willie Stark, a thinly disguised simulacrum of Huey Long, the Governor and later Senator. The narrator, Jack Burden, is a troubled, cynical, and difficult child of privilege who nonetheless rejects family money. After various failures (a PhD dissertation abandoned almost complete, a rejected proposal, a failed marriage) he finds work as a reporter and starts covering...