The white characters are racists, the African American characters are caricatures, and the plot line is violent.
This book, which is set in the rural south of a century ago, was their November choice, and if not for them, I neither would have heard of the book nor stuck with it. The white characters are racists, the African American characters are caricatures, and the plot li One of my favorite podcasts is Trumpcast, and in addition to all their excellent reporting on the Trump-Russia connection, the white backlash against Obama, and the financial conditions of rural America, they have a monthly book club. One of my favorite podcasts is Trumpcast, and in addition to all their excellent reporting on the Trump-Russia connection, the white backlash against Obama, and the financial conditions of rural America, they have a monthly book club. Now for that promised ranking of Warren’s novels: 1. Warren is incredibly underrated and under-read, and his books, other than the Pulitzer winner, are distressingly hard to find: the 10 Warren novels I own are copies by eight different publishers. Having read all his proper novels at last, I see myself as a champion of Warren, wanting others to realize what I now know: Though “All the King’s Men” towers over everything, he was much more than the writer of one masterpiece. The last section and conclusion of “Night Rider” could be better, but overall it’s a novel surprisingly fully formed, and quite good. What’s inside us? What are men capable of? Do they know what they’re doing, what they want? How do people, as small pieces of the bigger picture, get carried along in the flood of huge events, how do their ideals get corrupted? “The Truth: it devoured and blotted out each particular truth, each individual man’s truth, it crushed truths under a blundering tread, it was blind.” There’s more exterior action and less interior conflict here than in later Warren novels, but it’s still recognizable, if early, Warren, and as such has its quirks and digressions, but, like almost all of his novels, doesn’t suffer because of them.
#Night rider free
Munn finds dark corners of himself, a rot that causes him to lose his wife, and eventually, go on the run from authorities determined to break up the Free Farmers’ Brotherhood for Protection and Control and capture and prosecute its leaders. “But it’s surprising to a man what he’ll find in himself sometimes,” a character says. What starts as a high-minded grower’s organization morphs into a secret society staging night raids to scrape the tobacco beds of farmers who refuse to join them, then into a terrorist group that stoops to murder and barn-burning. Munn is likewise to be carried along by events as he unexpectedly finds himself becoming a key figure in the Association of Growers of Dark Fired Tobacco, a group seeking to force the tobacco companies into paying a reasonable price to farmers. “Night Rider” sets a template for much of Warren’s later fiction in treating historical events or eras with the tragic twist of a well-intentioned protagonist sucked into the maw of moral dilemmas and human greed.Īs "Night Rider" opens, lawyer Percy Munn is on a train, pushed forward with the crowd of passengers by the inertia of the train's coming to a stop. Here Warren, a native Kentuckian, writes about the tobacco war between independent growers and big tobacco companies in Kentucky and Tennessee in the first decade of the 20th century. It places in my top five of Warren’s novels (teaser: a 1 to 10 ranking coming at the end of this review!). While the bursts of bewitching writing are fewer and farther between here than would come - it’s Warren playing it “straighter” than later, which might actually appeal to some readers - the novel is still wonderfully written and quite remarkable for a first published work. I feared a somewhat tentative, not-fully-formed debut in “Night Rider” (no, it’s not about talking cars!) it isn’t. My wonderful, years-long journey to read all 10 of the novels of Robert Penn Warren ends sadly/happily with his first, “Night Rider” (1939). While the bursts of bewitching writing are fewer and farther between here than would come - it’s Warren playing it “straighter” than later, which might actually appeal to some readers - the novel is still wonderful And the first shall be last.
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