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The mighty Penn.

What more can you ask of a novel than that it change your life?

Because Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men had that effect on me, I can ask no more of it.

Even so, that novel has, over the years, had an even greater effect on me—as a reader, a teacher, and a writer—and especially my Civil War novel.

The first change in my life came in 1968 in Athens, Ohio, after I had read the novel for the second time and met Warren for the first time. I decided to accept an offer to become writer in residence at LSU because I wanted to live in the state that inspired the novel.

The second life-changing experience was even more personal. It came four years later after I had read the novel for the third time and was teaching it. On the day when I was trying to persuade my students that Jack Burden’s irrational jealousy was destroying himself and others, my wife told me if I didn’t do something about my own irrational jealousy, she might have to leave me. The irony struck me so powerfully she and I have been free of my jealous rages ever since.

I have not asked more of this novel, but I have experienced more. Having taught All the King’s Men to creative writers and literature students often, lectured about it, published essays on it, given dramatic readings from it and having created three Warren conferences at LSU, I now see that his great novel has influenced my own fiction writing. It has also provided the charged image for my second collection of essays, Touching the Web of Southern Writers.

What more can one ask of a novel?

Next question: What can one dare ask of a movie adaptation? I saw the first adaptation in 1949 in Washington, D.C., appropriately enough, long before I first read the novel and with no sense of its relation to Huey Long. So for me then, it was about American politics, and I realize now the distracting Huey Long/Louisiana association keeps the novel from being read as The Great American Novel. Knowing the current movie adaptation was shot in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, I fear it will not express the “American dream and nightmare” and cause the novel also to stay mired in Louisiana politics.

I have always argued the Civil War era chapter in the exact middle of the novel makes All the King’s Men one of the great Civil War novels because the effect of the war and Reconstruction pervades the entire novel. The first movie failed to make use of that key element, and I expect the new movie will miss the opportunity also.

I am fearful Sean Penn and Jude Law, both good actors, are miscast. The first adaptation understood to a reasonable extent the protagonist of the novel is not Willie Stark (Huey Long), but the narrator, Jack Burden. I am fearful the new movie will overstress Sean Penn as Willie Stark, making Jude Law as Jack Burden a shadowy bystander.

The ideal reader of the novel and the ideal movie will drop the Huey Long distortion, trace the lingering effect of the Civil War, focus upon the jealous witness (Jack Burden) and perhaps change a few lives.