Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.
Walker Percy, OSB was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction.
Huey Pierce Long Jr., nicknamed "the Kingfish", was an American politician who served as the 40th governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and as a United States senator from 1932 until his assassination in 1935. He was a left-wing populist member of the Democratic Party and rose to national prominence during the Great Depression for his vocal criticism of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, which Long deemed insufficiently radical. As the political leader of Louisiana, he commanded wide networks of supporters and often took forceful action. A controversial figure, Long is celebrated as a populist champion of the poor or, conversely, denounced as a fascistic demagogue.
Chester Trent Lott Sr. is an American lawyer, author, and politician. A former United States Senator from Mississippi, Lott served in numerous leadership positions in both the United States House of Representatives and the Senate. He entered Congress as one of the first of a wave of Republicans winning seats in Southern states that had been solidly Democratic. Later in his career, he served twice as Senate Majority Leader, and also, alternately, Senate Minority Leader. In 2003, he stepped down from the position after controversy due to his praising of senator Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist Dixiecrat presidential bid.
Carl Austin Weiss Sr. was an American physician from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who assassinated U.S. Senator Huey Long at the Louisiana State Capitol on September 8, 1935.
The Louisiana State Capitol is the seat of government for the U.S. state of Louisiana and is located in downtown Baton Rouge. The capitol houses the chambers for the Louisiana State Legislature, made up of the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as the office of the Governor of Louisiana. At 450 feet (137 m) tall and with 34 stories, it is the tallest skyscraper in Baton Rouge, the seventh tallest building in Louisiana, and tallest capitol in the United States. It is located on a 27-acre (110,000 m2) tract, which includes the capitol gardens. The Louisiana State Capitol is often thought of as "Huey Long's monument" due to the influence of the former Governor and U.S. Senator in getting the capitol built. The building's construction was completed in 1931. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1982.
Richard Webster Leche was an American attorney, judge, and politician, elected as the 44th Governor of the U.S. state of Louisiana. He served from 1936 until 1939, when he resigned. Convicted on federal charges of misuse of federal funds, Leche was the first Louisiana chief executive to be imprisoned.
Ross Becker is a journalist who primarily works in television, radio, and digital. He is the president and CEO of TvNewsmentor.com, dedicated to growing and mentoring talent. He is also the founding partner of Top News Talent, LLC, a coaching, training and representation company for broadcast, and digital journalists.
The Cornell Law Review is the flagship legal journal of Cornell Law School. Originally published in 1915 as the Cornell Law Quarterly, the journal features scholarship in all fields of law. Notably, past issues of the Cornell Law Review have included articles by Supreme Court justices Robert H. Jackson, John Marshall Harlan II, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust is an American historian and was the 28th president of Harvard University, the first woman to serve in that role. She was Harvard's first president since 1672 without an undergraduate or graduate degree from Harvard and the first to have been raised in the South. Faust is the former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Jeanne Leiby was an American teacher, fiction writer and literary magazine editor. Leiby's short stories were published in several U.S. literary journals, including Fiction, Indiana Review, The Greensboro Review, and New Orleans Review. In 2000, she won the Poets and Writers Writer Exchange. Her first collection of short stories, Downriver, was published by Carolina Wren Press as the 2006 winner of the Doris Bakwin prize. Leiby also served as fiction editor of Black Warrior Review and as the Editor in Chief of the Florida Review (2004–2007). In Spring 2008, she took over as editor of The Southern Review at LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Dutch Crossing is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to all aspects of Low Countries studies: history and art history, Dutch and Flemish literary and cultural studies, Dutch language, Dutch as a foreign language, and intercultural and transnational studies. Its stated purpose is to cover "all aspects of 'Global Dutch', not only the Netherlands and the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium but also other places where Dutch historically had or continues to have an impact, including parts of the Americas, Southern Africa, and South-East Asia." A special focus concerns exchanges between the Low Countries and the English-speaking world in all periods from the late Middle Ages to the present day. Dutch Crossing is the official journal of the Association for Low Countries Studies."
All the King's Men is a 1946 novel by Robert Penn Warren. The novel tells the story of charismatic populist governor Willie Stark and his political machinations in the Depression-era Deep South. It was inspired by the real-life story of U.S. Senator Huey P. Long, who was assassinated in 1935. Its title is drawn from the Charles Perrault nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty."
James Ashbrook Perkins is Professor Emeritus of English and Public Relations at Westminster College, New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, where he became a faculty member in 1973 and was department chair from 2000 to 2005.
Louis Decimus Rubin Jr. was a noted American literary scholar and critic, writing teacher, publisher, and writer. He is credited with helping to establish Southern literature as a recognized area of study within the field of American literature, as well as serving as a teacher and mentor for writers at Hollins College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and for founding Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a publishing company nationally recognized for fiction by Southern writers. He died in Pittsboro, North Carolina and is buried at the Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina.
Warren Olney Jr. was an American lawyer who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of California from March 1, 1919, to July 1921.
Emily Nemens is an American writer, editor and illustrator. From April 2018 to March 2021 she served as the editor of The Paris Review.
The political views of Huey P. Long have presented historians and biographers with some difficulty. While most say that Louisiana Governor and Senator Huey Long was a populist, little else can be agreed on. Huey Long's opponents, both during his life and after, often drew connections between him and his ideology and far-left and right political movements, comparing it to everything from European Fascism, Stalinism, and later McCarthyism. When asked about his own philosophy, Long simply replied: "Oh, hell, say that I’m sui generis and let it go at that." Writer Robert Penn Warren described him as a "remarkable set of contradictions."
Huey Long, governor of Louisiana and US Senator, has inspired or been portrayed in numerous cultural works. He has served as the template for fascistic politicians in novels like It Can't Happen Here (1935), A Lion Is in the Streets (1945), and All the King's Men (1946). The latter two were adapted into Oscar-winning films.
Thomas Harry Williams was an American academic and author. For the majority of his academic career between the 1930s to 1970s, Williams taught history at Louisiana State University. While at LSU, Williams was a Boyd Professor of History from 1953 to 1979. Near the end of his tenure at LSU, the university created the T. Harry Williams Chair of American History. Additional academic institutes Williams taught at include extension schools, in Wisconsin and at the Municipal University of Omaha.
