SOURCE: Clark, William Bedford. “From All the King's Men to Primary Colors.” America 175, no. 20 (28 December 1996): 26–29.

In the following essay, Clark finds parallels between Klein's Primary Colors and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.

Toward the end of 1928, Robert Penn Warren, enjoying one of the frequent holidays Oxford University afforded a Rhodes Scholar, visited his friend and mentor Allen Tate in Paris. Tate was already a master of what we now call “networking,” an activity he would pursue with characteristic zeal and sustained success throughout his career, and among the writers Tate introduced to the young Warren was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Warren made the quite understandable mistake of praising The Great Gatsby, a novel he had reviewed as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University some years before. Fitzgerald—as they say in Texas—pitched a fit. It would appear that the persistent critical acclaim lavished on The Great Gatsby...