American Literature books summary

and everything is bad, and that moral action involves making goodness out

of the badness.

Willie is married to Lucy Stark, with whom he has a son, Tom. But his

voracious sexual appetite leads him into a number of afiairs, including one

with Sadie Burke and one with Anne Stanton. Willie is murdered by Adam

Stanton toward the end of the novel.

Anne Stanton -- Jack Burden's first love, Adam Stanton's sister, and,

for a time, Willie Stark's mistress. The daughter of Governor Stanton, Anne

is raised to believe in a strict moral code, a belief which is threatened

and nearly shattered when Jack shows her proof of her father's wrongdoing.

Adam Stanton -- A brilliant surgeon and Jack Burden's closest

childhood friend. Anne Stanton's brother. Jack persuades Adam to put aside

his moral reservations about Willie and become director of the new hospital

Willie is building, and Adam later cares for Tom Stark after his injury.

But two revelations combine to shatter Adam's worldview: he learns that his

father illegally protected Judge Irwin after he took a bribe, and he learns

that his sister has become Willie Stark's lover. Driven mad with the

knowledge, Adam assassinates Willie in the lobby of the Capitol towards the

end of the novel.

Judge Montague Irwin -- A prominent citizen of Burden's Landing and a

former state Attorney General; also a friend to the Scholarly Attorney and

a father figure to Jack. When Judge Irwin supports one of Willie's

political enemies in a Senate election, Willie orders Jack to dig up some

information on the judge. Jack discovers that his old friend accepted a

bribe from the American Electric Power Company in 1913 to save his

plantation. (In return for the money, the judge dismissed a case against

the Southern Belle Fuel Company, a sister corporation to American

Electric.) When he confronts the judge with this information, the judge

commits suicide; when Jack learns of the suicide from his mother, he also

learns that Judge Irwin was his real father.

Sadie Burke -- Willie Stark's secretary, and also his mistress. Sadie

has been with Willie from the beginning, and believes that she made him

what he is. Despite the fact that he is a married man, she becomes

extremely jealous of his relationships with other women, and they often

have long, passionate fights. Sadie is tough, cynical, and extremely

vulnerable; when Willie announces that he is leaving her to go back to

Lucy, she tells Tiny Dufiy in a fit of rage that Willie is sleeping with

Anne Stanton. Tiny tells Adam Stanton, who assassinates Willie. Believing

herself to be responsible for Willie's death, Sadie checks into a

sanitarium. .

Tiny Dufiy -- Lieutenant-Governor of the state when Willie is

assassinated. Fat, obsequious, and untrustworthy, Tiny swallows Willie's

abuse and con- tempt for years, but finally tells Adam Stanton that Willie

is sleeping with Anne. When Adam murders Willie, Tiny becomes Governor.

Sugar-Boy O'Sheean -- Willie Stark's driver, and also his bodyguard--

Sugar-Boy is a crack shot with a .38 special and a brilliant driver. A

stuttering Irishman, Sugar-Boy follows Willie blindly.

Lucy Stark -- Willie's long-sufiering wife, who is constantly

disappointed by her husband's failure to live up to her moral standards.

Lucy eventually leaves Willie to live at her sister's poultry farm. They

are in the process of reconciling when Willie is murdered.

Tom Stark -- Willie's arrogant, hedonistic son, a football star for

the state university. Tom lives a life of drunkenness and promiscuity

before he breaks his neck in a football accident. Permanently paralyzed, he

dies of pneumonia shortly thereafter. Tom is accused of impregnating Sibyl

Frey, whose child is adopted by Lucy at the end of the novel.

Jack's mother -- A beautiful, "famished-cheeked" woman from Arkansas,

Jack's mother is brought back to Burden's Landing by the Scholarly

Attorney, but falls in love with Judge Irwin and begins an afiair with him;

Jack is a product of that afiair. After the Scholarly Attorney leaves her,

she marries a succession of men (the Tycoon, the Count, the Young

Executive). Jack's realization that she is capable of love--and that she

really loved Judge Irwin-- helps him put aside his cynicism at the end of

the novel.

Sam MacMurfee -- Willie's main political enemy within the state's

Democratic Party, and governor before Willie. After Willie crushes him in

the gubernatorial election, MacMurfee continues to control the Fourth

District, from which he plots ways to claw his way back into power.

Ellis Burden -- The man whom Jack believes to be his father for most

of the book, before learning his real father is Judge Irwin. After

discovering his wife's afiair with the judge, the "Scholarly Attorney" (as

Jack characterizes him) leaves her. He moves to the state capital where he

attempts to conduct a Christian ministry for the poor and the unfortunate.

Theodore Murrell -- The "Young Executive," as Jack characterizes him;

Jack's mother's husband for most of the novel.

Governor Joel Stanton -- Adam and Anne's father, governor of the state

when Judge Irwin was Attorney General. Protects the judge after he takes

the bribe to save his plantation.

Hugh Miller -- Willie Stark's Attorney General, an honorable man who

resigns following the Byram White scandal.

Joe Harrison -- Governor of the state who sets Willie up as a dummy

candidate to split the MacMurfee vote, and thereby enables Willie's

entrance onto the political stage. When Willie learns how Harrison has

treated him, he withdraws from the race and campaigns for MacMurfee, who

wins the election. By the time Willie crushes MacMurfee in the next

election, Harrison's days of political clout are over.

Mortimer L. Littlepaugh -- The man who preceded Judge Irwin as counsel

for the American Electric Power Company in the early 1900s. When Judge

Irwin took Littlepaugh's job as part of the bribe, Littlepaugh confronted

Governor Stanton about the judge's illegal activity. When the governor

protected the judge, Littlepaugh committed suicide.

Miss Lily Mae Littlepaugh -- Mortimer Littlepaugh's sister, an old

spiritual medium who sells her brother's suicide note to Jack, giving him

the proof he needs about Judge Irwin and the bribe.

Gummy Larson -- MacMurfee's most powerful supporter, a wealthy

businessman. Willie is forced to give Larson the building contract to the

hospital so that Larson will call MacMurfee off about the Sibyl Frey

controversy, and thereby preserve Willie's chance to go to the Senate.

Lois Seager -- Jack's sexy first wife, whom he leaves when he begins

to

perceive her as a person rather than simply as a machine for gratifying his

desires.

Byram B. White -- The State Auditor during Willie's first term as

governor. His acceptance of graft money propels a scandal that eventually

leads to an impeachment attempt against Willie. Willie protects White and

blackmails his enemies into submission, a decision which leads to his

estrangement from Lucy and the resignation of Hugh Miller.

Hubert Coffee -- A slimy MacMurfee employee who tries to bribe Adam

Stanton into giving the hospital contract to Gummy Larson.

Sibyl Frey -- A young girl who accuses Tom Stark of having gotten her

pregnant; Tom alleges that Sibyl has slept with so many men, she could not

possibly know he was the father of her child. Marvin Frey -- Sibyl Frey's

father, who threatens Willie with a paternity suit. (He is being used by

MacMurfee.)

Cass Mastern -- The brother of Jack's grandmother. During the middle

of the nineteenth century, Cass had an afiair with Annabelle Trice, the

wife of his friend Duncan. After Duncan's suicide, Annabelle sold a slave,

Phebe; Cass tried to track down Phebe, but failed. He became an

abolitionist, but fought in the Confederate Army during the Civil War,

during which he was killed. Jack tries to use his papers as the basis of

his Ph.D. dissertation, but walked away from the project when he was unable

to understand Cass Mastern's motivations.

Gilbert Mastern -- Cass Mastern's wealthy brother.

Annabelle Trice -- Cass Mastern's lover, the wife of Duncan Trice.

When the slave Phebe brings her Duncan's wedding ring following his

suicide, Annabelle says that she cannot bear the way Phebe looked at her,

and sells her.

Duncan Trice -- Cass Mastern's hedonistic friend in Lexington,

Annabelle Trice's husband. When he learns that Cass has had an afiair with

Annabelle, Duncan takes off his wedding ring and shoots himself.

Phebe -- The slave who brings Annabelle Trice her husband's wedding

ring following his suicide. As a result, Annabelle sells her.

Summary

All the King's Men is the story of the rise and fall of a political titan

in the Deep South during the 1930s. Willie Stark rises from hardscrabble

poverty to become governor of his state and its most powerful political

figure; he blackmails and bullies his enemies into submission, and

institutes a radical series of liberal reforms designed to tax the rich and

ease the burden of the state's poor farmers. He is beset with enemies--most

notably Sam MacMurfee, a defeated former governor who constantly searches

for ways to undermine Willie's power--and surrounded by a rough mix of

political allies and hired thugs, from the bodyguard Sugar-Boy O'Sheean to

the fat, obsequious Tiny Dufiy.

All the King's Men is also the story of Jack Burden, the scion of one

of the state's aristocratic dynasties, who turns his back on his genteel

upbringing and becomes Willie Stark's right-hand man. Jack uses his

considerable talents as a historical researcher to dig up the unpleasant

secrets of Willie's enemies, which are then used for purposes of blackmail.

Cynical and lacking in ambition, Jack has walked away from many of his past

interests--he left his dissertation in American History unfinished, and

never managed to marry his first love, Anne Stanton, the daughter of a

former governor of the state.

When Willie asks Jack to look for skeletons in the closet of Judge

Irwin, a father figure from Jack's childhood, Jack is forced to confront

his ideas concerning consequence, responsibility, and motivation. He

discovers that Judge Irwin accepted a bribe, and that Governor Stanton

covered it up; the resulting blackmail attempt leads to Judge Irwin's

suicide. It also leads to Adam Stanton's decision to accept the position of

director of the new hospital Willie is building, and leads Anne to begin an

afiair with Willie.

When Adam learns of the afiair, he murders Willie in a rage, and Jack

leaves politics forever. Willie's death and the circumstances in which it

occurs force Jack to rethink his desperate belief that no individual can

ever be responsible for the consequences of any action within the chaos and

tumult of history and time. Jack marries Anne Stanton and begins working on

a book about Cass Mastern, the man whose papers he had once tried to use as

the source for his failed dissertation in American History.

Chapter 1

Summary

Jack Burden describes driving down Highway 58 with his boss, Governor

Willie Stark, in the Boss's big black Cadillac--Sugar-Boy is driving, and

in the car with them were the Boss's wife Lucy, son Tommy, and the

Lieutenant Governor, Tiny Dufiy. Sugar-Boy drives them into Mason City,

where Willie is going to pose for a press photo with his father, who lives

on a nearby farm. The Cadillac is followed by a car full of press men and

photographers, overseen by Willie's secretary, Sadie Burke. It is summer,

1936, and scorching hot outside.

In Mason City, Willie immediately attracts an adoring throng of

people. The group goes inside the drugstore, where Doc pours them glasses

of Coke. The crowd pressures Willie for a speech, but he declines, saying

he's just come to see his "pappy". He then delivers an efiective impromptu

speech on the theme of not delivering a speech, saying he doesn't have to

stump for votes on his day off. The crowd applauds, and the group drives

out to the Stark farm.

On the way, Jack remembers his first meeting with Willie, in 1922,

when Jack was a reporter for the Chronicle and Willie was only the County

Treasurer of Mason County. Jack had gone to the back room of Slade's pool

hall to get some information from deputy-sherifi Alex Michel and Tiny Dufiy

(then the Tax Assessor, and an ally of then-Governor Harrison). While he

was there, Dufiy tried to bully Willie into drinking a beer, which Willie

claimed not to want, instead ordering an orange soda. Dufiy ordered Slade

to bring Willie a beer, and Slade said that he only served alcohol to men

who wanted to drink it. He brought Willie the orange soda. When Prohibition

was repealed after Willie's rise to power, Slade was one of the first men

to get a liquor license; he got a lease at an exceptional location, and was

now a rich man.

At the farm, Willie and Lucy pose for a picture with spindly Old Man

Stark and his dog. Then the photographers have Willie pose for a picture in

his old bedroom, which still contains all his schoolbooks. Toward sunset,

Sugar-Boy is out shooting cans with his .38 special, and Jack goes outside

for a drink from his ask and a look at the sunset. As he leans against the

fence, Willie approaches him and asks for a drink. Then Sadie Burke runs up

to them with a piece of news, which she reveals only after Willie stops

teasing her: Judge Irwin has just endorsed Callahan, a Senate candidate

running against Willie's man, Masters.

After dinner at the Stark farm, Willie announces that he, Jack, and Sugar-

Boy will be going for a drive. He orders Sugar-Boy to drive the Cadillac to

Burden's Landing, more than a hundred miles away. Jack grew up in Burden's

Landing, which was named for his ancestors, and he complains about the long

drive this late at night. As they approach Jack's old house, he thinks

about his mother lying inside with Theodore Murrell--not Jack's first

stepfather. And he thinks about Anne and Adam Stanton, who lived nearby and

used to play with him as a child. He also thinks about Judge Irwin, who

lives near the Stanton and Burden places, and who was a father figure to

Jack after his own father left. Jack tells Willie that Judge Irwin won't

scare easily, and inwardly hopes that what he says is true.

The three men arrive at Judge Irwin's, where Willie speaks insouciantly and

insolently to the gentlemanly old judge. Judge Irwin insults Jack for being

employed by such a man, and tells Willie that he endorsed Callahan because

of some damning information he had been given about Masters. Willie says

that it would be possible to find dirt on anyone, and advises the judge to

retract his endorsement, lest some dirt should turn up on him. He heavily

implies that Judge Irwin would lose his position as a judge. Judge Irwin

angrily throws the men out of his house, and on the drive back to Mason

City, Willie orders Jack to find some dirt on the judge, and to "make it

stick."

Writing in 1939, three years after that scene, Jack re ects that Masters--

who did get elected to the Senate--is now dead, and Adam Stanton is dead,

and Judge Irwin is dead, and Willie himself is dead: Willie, who told Jack

to find some dirt on Judge Irwin and make it stick. And Jack remembers:

"Little Jackie made it stick, all right."

Chapter 2 Summary

Jack Burden remembers the years during which Willie Stark rose to power.

While Willie was Mason County Treasurer, he became embroiled in a

controversy over the building contract for the new school. The head of the

city council awarded the contract to the business partner of one of his

relatives, no doubt receiving a healthy kickback for doing so. The

political machine attempted to run this contract over Willie, but Willie

insisted that the contract be awarded to the lowest bidder. The local big-

shots responded by spreading the story that the lowest bidder would import

black labor to construct the building, and, Mason County being redneck

country, the people sided against Willie, who was trounced in the next

election. Jack Burden covered all this in the Chronicle, which sided with

Willie.

After he was beaten out of offce, Willie worked on his father's farm, hit

the law books at night, and eventually passed the state bar exam. He set up

his own law practice. Then one day during a fire drill at the new school, a

fire escape collapsed due to faulty construction and three students died.

At the funeral, one of the bereaved fathers stood by Willie and cried aloud

that he had been punished for voting against an honest man. After that,

Willie was a local hero. During the next gubernatorial election, in which

Harrison ran against MacMurfee, the vote was pretty evenly divided between

city-dwellers, who supported Harrison, and country folk, who supported

MacMurfee. The Harrison camp decided to split the MacMurfee vote by

secretly setting up another candidate who could draw some of MacMurfee's

support in the country. They settled on Willie. One day Harrison's man,

Tiny Dufiy, visited Willie in Mason City and convinced him that he was

God's choice to run for governor.

Willie wanted the offce desperately, and so he believed him.Willie stumped

the state, and Jack Burden covered his campaign for the Chronicle. Willie

was a terrible candidate. His speeches were full of facts and figures; he

never stirred the emotions of the crowd. Eventually Sadie Burke, who was

with the Harrison camp and followed Willie's campaign, revealed to Willie

that he had been set up. Enraged, Willie gulped down a whole bottle of

whiskey and passed out in Jack Burden's room. The next day, he struggled to

make it to his campaign barbecue in the city of Upton. To help Willie

overcome his hangover, Jack had to fill him full of whiskey again. At the

barbecue, the furious, drunken Willie gave the crowd a fire-and-brimstone

speech in which he declared that he had been set up, that he was just a

hick like everyone else in the crowd, and that he was withdrawing from the

race to support MacMurfee. But if MacMurfee didn't deliver for the little

people, Willie admonished the hearers to nail him to the door. Willie said

that if they passed him the hammer he'd nail him to the door himself. Tiny

Dufiy tried to stop the speech, but fell off the stage.

Willie stumped for MacMurfee, who won the election. Afterwards, Willie

returned to his law practice, at which he made a great deal of money and

won some high- proffle cases. Jack didn't see Willie again until the next

election, when the political battlefield had changed: Willie now owned the

Democratic Party. Jack quit his job at the Chronicle because the paper was

forcing him to support MacMurfee in his column, and slumped into a

depression. He spent all his time sleeping and piddling around--he called

the period "the Great Sleep," and said it had happened twice before, once

just before he walked away from his doctoral dissertation in American

History, and once after Lois divorced him. During the Great Sleep Jack

occasionally visited Adam Stanton, took Anne Stanton to dinner a few times,

and visited his father, who now spent all his time handing out religious

iers. At some point during this time Willie was elected governor.

One morning Jack received a phone call from Sadie Burke, saying that the

Boss wanted to see him the next morning at ten. Jack asked who the Boss

was, and she replied, "Willie Stark, Governor Stark, or don't you read the

papers?" Jack went to see Willie, who offered him a job for $3,600 a year.

Jack asked Willie who he would be working for--Willie or the state.

Willie said he would be working for him, not the state. Jack wondered how

Willie could afiord to pay him $3,600 a year when the governorship only

paid $5,000. But then he remembered the money Willie had made as a lawyer.

He accepted the job, and the next night he went to have dinner at the

Governor's mansion.

Chapter 3 Summary

Jack Burden tells about going home to Burden's Landing to visit his mother,

some time in 1933. His mother disapproves of his working for Willie, and

Theodore Murrell (his mother's husband, whom Jack thinks of as "the Young

Executive") irritates him with his questions about politics. Jack remembers

being happy in the family's mansion until he was six years old, when his

father ("the Scholarly Attorney") left home to distribute religious

pamphlets, and Jack's mother told him he had gone because he didn't love

her anymore. She then married a succession of men: the Tycoon, the Count,

and finally the Young Executive. Jack remembers picnicking with Adam and

Anne Stanton, and swimming with Anne. He remembers arguing with his mother

in 1915 over his decision to go to the State University instead of to

Harvard.

That night in 1933, Jack, his mother, and the Young Executive go to Judge

Irwin's for a dinner party; the assembled aristocrats talk politics, and

are staunchly opposed to Willie Stark's liberal reforms. Jack is forced to

entertain the pretty young Miss Dumonde, who irritates him. When he drives

back to Willie's hotel, he kisses Sadie Burke on the forehead, simply

because she isn't named Dumonde. On the drive back, Jack thinks about his

parents in their youth, when his father brought his mother to Burden's

Landing from her home in Arkansas. In Willie's room, hell is breaking

loose: MacMurfee's men in the Legislature are mounting an impeachment

attempt on Byram B. White, the state auditor, who has been involved in a

graft scandal. Willie humiliates and insults White, but decides to protect

him. This decision causes Hugh Miller, Willie's Attorney General, to resign

from offce, and nearly provokes Lucy into leaving Willie. Willie orders

Jack to dig up dirt on MacMurfee's men in the Legislature, and he begins

frenetically stumping the state, giving speeches during the day and

intimidating and blackmailing MacMurfee's men at night. Stunned by his

aggressive activity, MacMurfee's men attempt to seize the offensive by

impeaching Willie himself. But the blackmailing efiorts work, and the

impeachment is called off before the vote can be taken. Still, the day of

the impeachment, a huge crowd descends on the capital in support of Willie.

Willie tells Jack that after the impeachment he is going to build a

massive, state-of-the-art hospital; Willie wins his next election by a

landslide.

During all this time, Jack re ects on Willie's sexual conquests--he has

begun a long-term afiair with Sadie Burke, who is fiercely jealous of his

other mistresses, but Lucy seems to know nothing about it. Lucy does

eventually leave Willie, spending time in St. Augustine and then at her

sister's poultry farm, but they keep up the appearance of marriage. Jack

speculates that Lucy does not sever all her ties with Willie for Tommy's

sake, though teen-aged Tommy has become an arrogant football star with a

string of sexual exploits of his own.

Chapter 4 Summary

Returning to the night in 1936 when he, Willie, and Sugar-Boy drove away

from Judge Irwin's house, Jack re ects that his inquiry into Judge Irwin's

past was really his second major historical study. He recalls his first, as

a graduate student at the State University, studying for his Ph.D. in

American History. Jack lived in a slovenly apartment with a pair of

slovenly roommates, and blew all the money his mother sent him on drinking

binges. He was writing his dissertation on the papers of Cass Mastern, his

father's uncle.

As a student at Translyvania College in the 1850s, Cass Mastern had had an

afiair with Annabelle Trice, the wife of his friend Duncan Trice. When

Duncan discovered the afiair, he took off his wedding ring and shot

himself, a suicide that was chalked up to accident. But Phebe, one of the

Trices' slaves, had found the ring, and taken it to Annabelle Trice.

Annabelle had been unable to bear the knowledge that Phebe knew about her

sin, and so she sold her. Appalled to learn that Annabelle had sold Phebe

instead of setting her free--and appalled to learn that she had separated

the slave from her husband--Cass set out to find and free Phebe; but he

failed, wounded in a fight with a man who insinuated that he had sexual

designs on Phebe.

After that, he set to farming a plantation he had obtained with the help of

his wealthy brother Gilbert. But he freed his slaves and became a devout

abolitionist. Even so, when the war started, he enlisted as a private in

the Confederate Army. Complicating matters further, though a Confederate

soldier he vowed not to kill a single enemy soldier, since he believed

himself already responsible for the death of his friend. He was killed in a

battle outside Atlanta in 1864. After leaving to find Phebe, he had never

set eyes on Annabelle Trice again.

One day Jack simply gave up working on his dissertation. He could not

understand why Cass Mastern acted the way he did, and he walked away from

the apartment without even boxing up the papers. A landlady sent them to

him, but they remained unopened as he endured a long stretch of the Great

Sleep. The papers remained in their unopened box throughout the time he

spent with his beautiful wife Lois; after he left her, they remained

unopened. The brown paper parcel yellowed, and the name "Jack

Burden,"written on top, slowly faded.

Chapter 5 Summary

In 1936, Jack mulls over the problem of finding dirt on Judge Irwin. He

thinks the judge would have been motivated by ambition, love, fear, or

money, and settles on money as the most likely reason he might have been

driven over the line. He goes to visit his father, but the Scholarly

Attorney is preoccupied taking care of an "unfortunate" named George, and

refuses to answer his "foul" questions. He visits Anne and Adam Stanton at

their father's musty old mansion, and learns from Adam that the judge was

once broke, back in 1913. But Anne tells him that the judge got out of his

financial problems by marrying a rich woman.

At some time during this period, Jack goes to one of Tommy's football games

with Willie. Tommy wins the game, and Willie says that he will be an All-

American. Tommy receives the adulation of Willie and all his cohorts, and

lives an arrogant life full of women and alcohol. Also during this time,

Jack learns from Tiny Dufiy that Willie is spending six million dollars on

the new hospital. Soon after, Anne tells Jack that she herself had lunch

with Willie, in a successful attempt to get state funding for one of her

charities.

Jack decides to investigate the judge's financial past further. Delving

into court documents and old newspapers, he discovers that the judge had

not married into money, but had taken out a mortgage on his plantation,

which he was nearly unable to pay. A sudden windfall enabled him to stop

foreclosure proceedings toward the end of his term as Attorney General

under Governor Stanton. Also, after his term he had been given a lucrative

job at American Electric Power Company. After some further digging, Jack

extracts a letter from a strange old spiritual medium named Lily Mae

Littlepaugh, from her brother George Littlepaugh, whom Judge Irwin replaced

at the power company. The letter, a suicide note, reveals that the judge

received a great deal of stock and the lucrative position at the power

company as a bribe for dismissing a court case brought against the Southern

Belle Fuel Company, which had the same parent company as American Electric

Power.

Littlepaugh says that he visited Governor Stanton to try to convince him to

bring the matter to light, but Stanton chose to protect his friend the

judge; when Miss Littlepaugh visited the governor after her brother's

suicide, he again protected the judge, and threatened Miss Littlepaugh with

prosecution for insurance fraud. After seven months of digging, Jack has

his proof.

Chapter 6 Summary

During the time Jack is investigating Judge Irwin's background, Tommy

Stark, drunk, wraps his car around a tree, severely injuring the young girl

riding with him. Her father, a trucker, raises a tremendous noise about the

accident, but he is quieted when he is reminded that truckers drive on

state highways and many truckers have state contracts. Lucy is livid about

Tommy's crash, even though Tommy is unhurt; she insists that Willie make

him stop playing football and living his rambunctious life, but Willie says

that he won't see his son turn into a sissy, and that he wants Tommy to

have fun.

Willie is, during this time, completely committed to his six-million-dollar

hospital project, and he insists, to Jack's bemusement, that it will be

completed without any illicit wheeling and dealing. Willie is furious when

Tiny Dufiy tries to convince him to give the contract to Gummy Larson, a

Mac-Murfee supporter who would throw his support to Willie if he received

the building contract. (He would also throw a substantial sum of money to

Tiny himself.) But Willie insists that the project will be completely

clean, and seems to think of it as his legacy--he even says that he does

not care whether it wins him any votes. He insists as well that Jack

convince Adam Stanton to run it.

Jack knows that Adam hates the entire Stark administration, but he visits

his friend's apartment to make the offer nevertheless. Adam is outraged,

but he seems tempted when Jack points out how much good he would be able to

do as director of the hospital. Eventually, after Anne becomes involved,

Adam agrees to take the job. He has a conversation with Willie during which

Willie espouses his moral theory--that the only thing for a man to do is

create goodness out of badness, because everything is bad, and the only

reason something becomes good is because a person thinks it makes things

better. Adam is wary of Willie, but he still takes the job--after he

receives Willie's promise not to interfere in the running of the hospital.

During this time Jack learns that Anne has found out that Adam received the

offer to run the hospital. She visits Jack, and says that she desperately

wants Adam to take it. In a moment of bitterness, Jack tells her about how

her father illegally protected Judge Irwin after he took the bribe. Anne is

crushed; but she visits Adam with the information, and that is what prompts

Adam to compromise his ideals and take the directorship. Anne, Adam, and

Jack attend a speech Willie gives, during which he announces his intention

to give the citizens of the state free medical care and free educations.

Anne asks urgently if Willie really means it, and Jack replies, "How the

hell should I know?"

But something nags the back of Jack's mind: he is unable to figure out how

Anne learned that Adam had been offered the directorship of the hospital.

Adam didn't tell her, and Willie says that he didn't tell her, and Jack

didn't tell her. He finds out that Sadie Burke told her, in a jealous

rage—for Sadie says that Anne is Willie's new slut, that she has become his

mistress. Jack is shocked, but when he visits Anne, she gives him a

wordless nod that confirms Sadie's accusation.

Chapter 7 Summary

After learning about Anne's afiair with Willie Stark, Jack ees westward. He

spends several days driving to California, then, after he arrives, three

days in Long Beach. On the way, he remembers his past with Anne Stanton,

and tries to understand what happened that led her to Willie. When they

were children, Jack spent most of his time with Adam Stanton, and Anne

simply tagged along. But the summer after his junior year at the State

University, when he was twenty-one and Anne was seventeen, Jack fell in

love with Anne, and spent the summer with her. They played tennis together,

and swam together at night, and pursued an increasingly intense physical

relationship-- Jack remembers that Anne was not prudish, that she seemed to

regard her body as something they both possessed, and that they had to

explore together. Two nights before Anne was scheduled to leave for her

boarding school, they found themselves alone in Jack's house during a

thunderstorm, and nearly made love for the first time--but Jack hesitated,

and then his mother came home early, ending their chance. The next day Jack

tried to convince Anne to marry him, but she demurred, saying that she

loved him, but seemed to feel that something in his unambitious character

was an impediment to her giving in to her love. After Anne left for school,

they continued to write every day, but their feelings dwindled, and the

next few times they saw each other, things were difierent between them.

Over Christmas, Anne wouldn't let Jack make love to her, and they had a

fight about it. Eventually the letters stopped, and Jack got thrown out of

law school, and began to study history, and then eventually he was married

to Lois, a beautiful sexpot whose friends he despised and who did not

interest him as a person. Toward the end of their marriage, he entered into

a phase of the Great Sleep, and then left her altogether.

After two years at a very refined women's college in Virginia, Anne

returned to Burden's Landing to care for her ailing father. She was engaged

several times but never married, and after her father died, she became an

old maid, though she kept her looks and her charm. She devoted herself to

her work at the orphanage and her other charities. Jack feels as though she

could never marry him because of some essential confidence he lacked, and

that she was drawn to Willie Stark because he possessed that confidence.

Jack also feels that because he revealed to Anne the truth of her father's

duplicity in protecting Judge Irwin after he accepted the bribe, he is

responsible for Anne's afiair with Willie. But he tries to convince himself

that the only human motivation is a certain kind of biological compulsion,

a kind of itch in the blood, and that therefore, he is not responsible for

Anne's behavior.

He says this attitude was a "dream" that made his trip west deliver on its

promise of "innocence and a new start"--if he was able to believe the

dream.

Chapter 8 Summary

Jack drives eastward back to his life. He stops at a filling station in New

Mexico, where he picks up an old man heading back to Arkansas. (The old man

was driven to leave for California by the Dust Bowl, but discovered that

California was no better than his home.) The old man has a facial twitch,

of which he seems entirely unaware. Jack, thinking about the twitch,

decides that it is a metaphor for the randomness and causelessness of life--

the very ideas he had been soothing himself with in California, ideas which

excused him from responsibility for Willie and Anne's afiair--and begins to

refer to the process of life as the "Great Twitch."

Feeling detached from the rest of the world because of his new "secret

knowledge," as he calls the idea of the Great Twitch, Jack visits Willie

and resumes his normal life. He sees Adam a few times and goes to watch him

perform a prefrontal lobotomy on a schizophrenic patient, which seems to

him another manifestation of the Great Twitch. One night, Anne calls Jack,

and he meets her at an all-night drugstore; she tells him that a man named

Hubert Coffee tried to offer Adam a bribe to throw the building contract

for the new hospital to Gummy Larson. In a rage, Adam hit the man, threw

himout, and wrote a letter resigning from his post as director of the

hospital.

Anne asks Jack to convince Adam to change his mind; Jack says that he will

try, but that Adam is acting irrationally, and therefore may not listen to

reason. He says he will tell Willie to bring charges against Hubert Coffee

for the attempted bribe, which will convince Adam that Willie is not

corrupt, at least when it comes to the hospital. Anne offers to testify,

but Jack dissuades her--if she did testify, he says, her afiair with Willie

would become agrantly and unpleasantly public. Jack asks Anne why she has

given herself to Willie, and Anne replies that she loves Willie, and that

she will marry him after he is elected to the Senate next year.

Willie agrees to bring the charges against Coffee, and Jack is able to

persuade Adam to remain director of the hospital. That crisis is

averted,but a more serious crisis arises when a man named Marvin Frey--a

man, not coincidentally, from MacMurfee's district--accuses Tom Stark of

having impregnated his daughter Sibyl. Then one of MacMurfee's men visits

Willie and says that Marvin Frey wants Tom to marry his daughter--but that

Frey will see reason if, say, Willie were to let MacMurfee win the Senate

seat next year. Willie delays his answer, hoping to come up with a better

solution.

In the meantime, Jack goes to visit Lucy Stark at her sister's poultry

farm, where he explains to her what has happened with Tom. Lucy is

crestfallen, and says that Sibyl Frey's child is innocent of evil and

innocent of politics, and deserves to be cared for.

Willie comes up with a shrewd solution for dealing with MacMurfee and Frey.

Remembering that MacMurfee owes most of his current political clout, such

as it is, to the fact that Judge Irwin supports him, Willie asks Jack if he

was able to discover anything sordid in Judge Irwin's past. Jack says that

he was, but he refuses to tell Willie what it is until he gives Judge Irwin

the opportunity to look at the evidence and answer for himself.

Jack travels to Burden's Landing, where he goes for a swim and watches a

young couple playing tennis, feeling a lump in his throat at his memories

of Anne. He then goes to visit the judge, who is happy to see Jack, and who

apologizes for being so angry the last time they spoke. Jack tells the

judge what MacMurfee is trying to do and asks him to call MacMurfee off.

The judge says that he refuses to become mixed up in the matter, and Jack

is forced to ask him about the bribe and Mortimer Littlepaugh's suicide.

The judge admits that he did take the bribe, and accepts responsibility for

his actions, saying that he also did some good in his life. He refuses to

give in to the blackmail attempt.

Jack goes back to his mother's house, where he hears a scream from

upstairs. Running upstairs, he finds his mother sobbing insensibly, the

phone receiver off the hook and on the oor. When she sees Jack she cries

out that Jack has killed Judge Irwin--whom she refers to as Jack's father.

Jack learns that Judge Irwin has committed suicide, by shooting himself in

the heart, at the same moment he learns that Judge Irwin, and not the

Scholarly Attorney, was his real father. Jack realizes that the Scholarly

Attorney must have left Jack's mother when he learned of her afiair with

the judge. In a way, Jack is glad to be unburdened of his father's

weakness, which he felt as a curse, and is even glad to have traded a weak

father for a strong one. But he remembers his father giving him a chocolate

when he was a child, and says that he was not sure how he felt.

Jack goes back to the capital, where he learns the next day that he was

Judge Irwin's sole heir. He has inherited the very estate that the judge

took the bribe in order to save. The situation seems so crazily logical--

Judge Irwin takes the bribe in order to save the estate, then fathers Jack,

who tries to blackmail his father with information about the bribe, which

causes Judge Irwin to commit suicide, which causes Jack to inherit the

estate; had Judge Irwin not taken the bribe, Jack would have had nothing to

inherit, and had Jack not tried to blackmail Judge Irwin, the judge would

not have killed himself, and Jack would not have inherited the estate when

he did--so crazily logical that Jack bursts out laughing. But before long

he is sobbing and saying "the poor old bugger" over and over again. Jack

says this is like the ice breaking up after a long, cold winter.

Chapter 9 Summary

Jack goes to visit Willie, who asks him about Judge Irwin's death. Jack

tells the Boss that he will no longer have anything to do with blackmail,

even on MacMurfee, and he is set to work on a tax bill. Over the next few

weeks, Tom continues to shine at his football games, but the Sibyl Frey

incident has left Willie irritable and dour as he tries to concoct a plan

for dealing with MacMurfee. In the end, Willie is forced to give the

hospital contract to Gummy Larson, who can control MacMurfee, who can call

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