Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction / Hugh Ingrasci -- The Text of the “Restored” Edition of All The King's Men / Noel Polk -- The Great Disconnect: Jack Burden and History in All The King’s Men / Larry A. Gray -- Jack Burden: Successful Historian in All The King’s Men / James Perkins -- “The Awful Responsibility of Time”: Understanding History in All The King’s Men / Ben Railton -- “The Theory of Historical Costs”: Jack Burden, History, and the (Mis)Representation of the Past in Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men / Andrew M. Hakim -- Twitches and Trigger-fingers: Accidental Homicides and Suicides in Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men / Alex Wulff -- The Inversion of Home in All The King’s Men / Robert McParland -- “Little Jackie Made It Stick, All Right”: The Implicating Narrative of Jack Burden / Bert Emerson -- Theological Reflections on Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men / Mark T. Mitchell -- The Many Faces of God: Layered Imagery of the Deity in Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men / Michael J. Meyer -- 'All The King’s Men,' Spiritual Aesthetics, and the Reader / Robert Koppelman -- Midcentury Jack vs. Millennium Jack: The Ongoing Burden of Identity on Film / Cecilia Donohue -- Abstract of Arguments -- Author Biographies -- Index.

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The twelve essayists in this critical collection examine anew two fundamental concerns of Penn Warren’s landmark work, which has as valid a claim to being “The Great American Novel” as any in the literary canon. The first challenging conundrum these critics examine is narrator Jack Burden’s adequacy as a historiographer and the impact of his reliability upon his alter-ego-persona-narrative: does Jack succeed in becoming an able historian of his family and of Willie Stark’s political career, or does he become self-delusive and resort to a “selectively culled” history to justify himself to his audience as a trustworthy chronicler of the Willie Stark era of Jack’s life. The second major thematic motif these essays explore is Penn Warren’s implicit positing of a spiritual dimension to Jack Burden’s quest for a viable identity to sustain him in his ultimate decision to join humanity and finally live in the history he’s so long lived outside of, as a cynically un-involved observer. The provocative efforts of these twelve scholars, fifty-six years after the publication of All the King’s Men , testifies to the novel’s great philosophical and psychological depths, riches that continue to induce new readers and returning readers to shadow Jack Burden in his quest of the examined life: the quest to fully engage ourselves in becoming ever more human despite our being flawed, ever-plagued by our social shortcomings, as are “all the king’s men.”