Read All the King's Men in the Shadow of Huey's Statue

This is, in our estimation, one in a list of thirty marvelous places, flavors, events, and experiences that anyone who lives in—or loves—our part of the world should experience at least once in his or her lifetime.

“And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.”

~ Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

In 1938 a marble pedestal surmounted by a bronze statue was erected over the gravesite of Louisiana’s populist governor who was assassinated on September 8, 1935. Facing the Louisiana State Capitol building (the tallest in the nation) in which he died, Huey Pierce Long’s statue recalls the infamous reformer who, buoyed by Louisiana’s poor and downtrodden, climbed to the heights of state power. Set amid thirty acres of tranquil Capitol Gardens, Huey’s statue makes a peaceful place to contemplate the untethered ambition—and the achievements—of the Kingfish through the pages of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren that he inspired.