This dramatic version of the widely known work, which, as a novel, was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, had a highly successful Off-Broadway run during the 1959 season. As told by Atkinson: "Eliminate the story of Huey Long, which Mr. Warren says is not what he is trying to interpret. He is anatomizing the career with nothing but purity in his heart. Discovering that he is being used by a cynical machine, [Willie] adopts their methods, and presently, he is in control of the state. By resorting to corrupt methods he accomplishes things for the people that were only abstract ideals when he was campaigning honestly. As a portrait of politics, this is effective and provocative."

In 1979 Robert Penn Warren returned to his native Todd Country, Kentucky, to attend ceremonies in honor of another native son, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, whose United States citizenship had just been restored, ninety years after his death, by a special act of Congress. From that nostalgic journey grew this reflective essay on the tragic career of Jefferson Davis — "not a modern man in any sense of the word but a conservative called to manage what was, in one sense, a revolution." Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back is also a meditation by one of our most respected men of letters on the ironies of American history and the paradoxes of the modern South.

Warren's first novel, set during the "tobacco wars" that raged in Kentucky and Tennessee in the early part of this century. Percy Munn is one of Warren's innocent idealists whose delusions become murderous as he attempts to define himself by action in the unfolding violence around him. Southern Classics Series.