Robert Penn Warren
All The King's Men
1946
A beautifully constructed Pulitzer Prize winning portrait of American politics and corruption. Governer Willie Stark is almost a premonition of Nixon a full 20 years before he rose to power and a quarter decade before his fall (partly through the work of this book's near namesake).
Every page is poetry, every character fully described. Penn Warren's language brings the book's American South setting alive, and allows Willie Stark to seduce you though his actions are so abhorrant, and in this way Penn Warren created a wholly believable politician.
Favourite Stark quote, "There's something on everybody. Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud."
I wonder if Nixon had this in mind when he sent out his "ratfuckers".
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