Not sure where on the list it would fall but I have a hard time believing there are 10 American novels better than All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. I read it every four years (Presidential campaign years) as I think it is the best novel ever written about American politics.
It’s also hard to believe there would be a list like this with no Hemingway or Fitzgerald works on it.
The author of this post has pretty much no idea what he is talking about.
Really good novels about American politics are hard to find, and “All the King’s Men” was an attempt to write a serious novel about politics. I didn’t much care for it, though. Warren was too obsessed with the idea of original sin. As ideas go, it’s not a bad one or a false one, but a novelist has to know when to let his ideas have a rest and let the characters take over. They have to be convincing in themselves and not just part of the author’s plan.
There was a lot of discussion about whether the novel was a warning about fascism. There is some of that, but I think Warren’s attitude towards Huey Long (and his character, Willie Stark) was more complicated and conflicted than that. Whether he liked Long and Long’s way of doing things, a job at Long’s LSU saw Warren through the Depression.