All the King’s Men is one of the most significant political novels in US literature. Based on the career of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long, the novel follows the rise and fall of the fictional Willie Stark. This chapter traces Stark’s development as a populist, using the work of Michael Kazin and others to argue that populism must be defined by its rhetorical characteristics. We know that a political actor is populist not necessarily by their policy proposals, but always by the way they talk. Populism is performed in a language of grievance. The populist uses an emotive rhetoric that invokes a binary of “the people” against an “elite” above them and a racialized poor below them. The populist politician positions himself as “the people’s” representative, the only one who can speak and act on their behalf. This chapter analyzes speeches in All the King’s Men, demonstrating how they embody the populist binary and its rhetorical moves. Ultimately, the chapter considers the economic and social conditions that can allow a demagogue to rise in fiction and in real life.

This chapter explores the significance of Gothic to an emergent American modernist aesthetic, surveying a range of current theories of Gothic and focusing particularly on the legacies of slavery and the politics of segregation in the American South, but also evoking other historical traumas. European modernism is conventionally understood largely to have disavowed Gothic romance; by contrast, under the influence of William Faulkner and others, the particular strand of fiction associated with the Southern Literary Renaissance developed Gothic motifs into a distinctive idiom through which to explore themes of otherness and difference and to reflect on the significance of the individual and collective past, in depictions both disavowing and incorporating everyday deviance amid a society of social taboos against miscegenation, incest, homosexuality that were everywhere symbolically enforced though commonly violated in practice. In doing so, and in developing an ambivalent, paradoxical body of writings that might best be described as ‘modernist regional Gothic’, such writers as Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor took Gothic in a radically new direction.