Abstract
All the King’s Men (1946) is the most important novel about politics in the American tradition. It is also one of the key texts of the renascence of Southern literature in the twentieth century, alongside the fiction of Faulkner, Porter, O’Connor, and Welty. Although it is often seen as a novel about the possibility of totalitarian dictatorship in the United States, it is best seen as a novel about the temptations and problems of populism, particularly as populism developed in the post-Reconstruction South, and as a meditation about the problem of reconciling means and ends in politics, about the temptation to overturn the political order in order to serve an urgent call for justice and an urgent responsibility to remedy human need.