All the King's Men

Note to self: This was incredible. After sitting on my to-read shelf for over a year, I finally pulled my way through the first chapters and was hooked by halfway. The structure, the language, the loftiness. Robert Penn Warren, like Conroy, paints a picture of the tainted South so gorgeously that it's hard not to want to escape to the humid languor of the Southern coast, despite the region's myriad faults.