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Richard Gray has asserted that All the King\'s Men is typically Southern in its concern with the way past and present are inextricably linked. That is certainly a central theme of the novel, but that is precisely the problem: its generality. Surely all sorts of works in modernist literature are organized around this theme without thereby making them uniquely Southern.
Thus in All the King\'s Men, and in most of Warren\'s fiction, the South serves as a setting rather than a theme itself. More important, Warren\'s dominant concern in All the King\'s Men is less an evaluation of the collective Southern past than, first, an exploration of the problem of power and political insurgency and, second, of self-definition and identity.
-Richard H. King, A Southern Renaissance, 1980
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