Robert Penn Warren and His Persistent Schism between Fact and Idea

In this article I discuss the “terrible division of our age” in Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men. I argue that a division between politics and ethics persists through the novel and through Warren’s larger body of work. This schism is meant to be fundamental to modernity, and Warren does not intend a resolution to it. I use his first book, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr, as a lens of analysis to show how his portrayal of John Brown anticipates characteristics of central characters that personify the terrible divide in his seminal publication. In doing so, I demonstrate that Warren forces our attention to an underlying logic of modernity.