Night Rider

by Robert Penn Warren

Warren s first novel, set during the "tobacco wars" that raged in Kentucky and Tennessee in the early part of this century. Percy Munn is one of Warren s innocent idealists whose delusions become murderous as he attempts to define himself by action in the unfolding violence around him. Southern Classics Series.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Historical Fiction, Southern, American, Novels

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

And the first shall be last. My wonderful, years-long journey to read all 10 of the novels of Robert Penn Warren ends sadly/happily with his first, “Night Rider” (1939).

I feared a somewhat tentative, not-fully-formed debut in “Night Rider” (no, it’s not about talking cars!); it isn’t. While the bursts of bewitching writing are fewer and farther between here than would come — it’s Warren playing it “straighter” than later, which might actually appeal to some readers — the novel is still wonderfully written and quite remarkable for a first published work. It places in my top five of Warren’s novels (teaser: a 1 to 10 ranking coming at the end of this review!).

Here Warren, a native Kentuckian, writes about the tobacco war between independent growers and big tobacco companies in Kentucky and Tennessee in the first decade of the 20th century. “Night Rider” sets a template for much of Warren’s later fiction in treating historical events or eras with the tragic twist of a well-intentioned protagonist sucked into the maw of moral dilemmas and human greed.

As "Night Rider" opens, lawyer Percy Munn is on a train, pushed forward with the crowd of passengers by the inertia of the train's coming to a stop. Munn is likewise to be carried along by events as he unexpectedly finds himself becoming a key figure in the Association of Growers of Dark Fired Tobacco, a group seeking to force the tobacco companies into paying a reasonable price to farmers. What starts as a high-minded grower’s organization morphs into a secret society staging night raids to scrape the tobacco beds of farmers who refuse to join them, then into a terrorist group that stoops to murder and barn-burning. “But it’s surprising to a man what he’ll find in himself sometimes,” a character says. Munn finds dark corners of himself, a rot that causes him to lose his wife, and eventually, go on the run from authorities determined to break up the Free Farmers’ Brotherhood for Protection and Control and capture and prosecute its leaders.

There’s more exterior action and less interior conflict here than in later Warren novels, but it’s still recognizable, if early, Warren, and as such has its quirks and digressions, but, like almost all of his novels, doesn’t suffer because of them. What’s inside us? What are men capable of? Do they know what they’re doing, what they want? How do people, as small pieces of the bigger picture, get carried along in the flood of huge events, how do their ideals get corrupted? “The Truth: it devoured and blotted out each particular truth, each individual man’s truth, it crushed truths under a blundering tread, it was blind.”

The last section and conclusion of “Night Rider” could be better, but overall it’s a novel surprisingly fully formed, and quite good. Having read all his proper novels at last, I see myself as a champion of Warren, wanting others to realize what I now know: Though “All the King’s Men” towers over everything, he was much more than the writer of one masterpiece. Warren is incredibly underrated and under-read, and his books, other than the Pulitzer winner, are distressingly hard to find: the 10 Warren novels I own are copies by eight different publishers.

Now for that promised ranking of Warren’s novels: 1. All the King’s Men; 2. A Place to Come To; 3. Band of Angels; 4. Night Rider; 5. At Heaven’s Gate; 6. Meet Me in the Green Glen; 7. The Cave; 8. Flood; 9. World Enough and Time; 10. Wilderness.

[Kressel Housman · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of my favorite podcasts is Trumpcast, and in addition to all their excellent reporting on the Trump-Russia connection, the white backlash against Obama, and the financial conditions of rural America, they have a monthly book club. This book, which is set in the rural south of a century ago, was their November choice, and if not for them, I neither would have heard of the book nor stuck with it. The white characters are racists, the African American characters are caricatures, and the plot line is violent. The protagonist is attorney Percy Munn, and I think of him as the anti-Atticus. He gets his white client acquitted of murder by pinning the crime on a black man, and though it's not an outright frame-up job in that he really believes his client is innocent, it's still unforgivable. The character only goes downhill from there. At the outset, the association of tobacco farmers that he leads seems worthwhile in that they're taking on the corporate owners who are underpaying them, but the group gets increasingly Klan-like, riding around at night in white masks, threatening non-compliant farmers and burning their crops. The only admirable character comes late in the book: Willy Proudfit, a white man who has lived alongside Native Americans.

I'm glad I read the book if only for Trumpcast's analysis of it. It is action-packed, and many of the characters are well-drawn, but the bleak violence, though it makes its point, is just not my cup of tea.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

What an odd novel this is. Night Rider is a long moody account of a dreamy, untethered soul caught up in down-to-earth matters that falter and lurch and bring him crashing down to earth. The novel opens with the young lawyer Percy Munn practicing in his small hometown of Bardsville, Kentucky, at the beginning of the 20th century. He’s been married for four years in quiet contentment with his wife. All seems good, but Munn almost abstractedly finds himself drawn into a larger vortex of activity, allying himself with a cabal seeking to leverage larger payouts from the big tobacco companies who routinely gouge the small farmer.

Munn observes how this “noble” cause step by inexorable step becomes tainted, corrupt, and violent, ultimately falling outside the law and bringing down on him and his confederates federal forces. Even as the larger enterprise slowly derails, Munn’s personal life emulates the same spluttering, downward trajectory. His marriage falls apart as he aspires to win the affections of the free-spirited daughter of one of his tobacco confederates. Lucille Christian seems to promise him a passion he’s not experienced in his quiet marriage. When everything collapses, and he flees and holes up for several months with a hard-scrabble old farmer (Willie Proudfit), he still dreams of running off with Lucille. At the same time, he dreams of exacting revenge on the broken-down Senator who’d done him wrong by bringing him into the tobacco alliance then abandoning it and advocating ineffectually against it.

Munn’s character is unmoored throughout, and he allows circumstances to jolt him from one course of action to another, admiring and following one man then another, each of them men of action and conviction. Warren is especially good at describing Munn’s detachment from things, making us aware that Munn is seemingly floating outside himself in the course of things. Munn has been raised with the right values, and this is illustrated in his efforts to win the freedom of a loutish farmer accused of murder. These efforts, which lead to the execution of an old Black laborer, turn sour when others imply he’d planted the evidence, and turn even darker when it becomes clear that the man he’d defended proves himself a killer.

Munn’s detached sensibility can’t help him remain free of the consequences of his half-hearted participation in events, and when he’s holed up for months, eluding federal and local authorities who want to bring him to trial for murder, he latches haphazardly onto the notion of killing the Senator. It’s a chimerical cause, no more meaningfully committed to than any of the others that have brought him to this point in his life. He walks into an ambush, only recognizing in his dying moments that he’d been betrayed by Proudfit’s bilious, resentful nephew.

Why I consider the novel peculiar has to do with the aimlessness of Percy Munn, how this is conveyed in the numerous scenes of his detached maundering about the impressions he brings to the fore that lie only peripherally at the scene of events. Warren appears to be painting the portrait of a dangling man, a man suspended existentially above a cauldron of events, unable to make an authentic decision. During the Great Depression, when the country’s many voices of discontent pulled it in several directions, many came to question the verities on which they’d based their lives. It seems a particularly prescient novel, and I’ve alluded to another (Dangling Man, by Saul Bellow) that echoes this existential dislocation. Night Rider is not a comfortable novel to read, as there’s not much to hold onto, but as a portrait of what comes of a spirit of diffidence and ambivalence, when it falls sway to men of wrong-headed conviction, it is painfully convincing.

[Noreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Other than Robert Penn Warrens "Understanding Fiction" in Lucy Hunter's AP English in 1969, this is the first fiction I've read. Reminds me of Achebe's "Things fall apart." A man follows the dictates of his culture and loses his soul in the process. Warrens descriptions and language are rich.

pg 265 They cracked down on Senator Tolliver,' Mr Munn observed. "He was living in the office there on his place,and they've evicted him. He's still got some influence, I reckon, and if they'd evict him, they'd evict anybody' They used him and they're through. He's a second hand corncob now, I tell you. And nobody gives a damn. Do you?

pg 171 Mother and son relationship.

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

God damn. This was his first book?!

Warren's magnum opus, “All the King's Men,” is one of my all-time favorite books. (Like, if I made a top 5 books - and I’m exactly the type of guy to do that - ATKM would easily rank among them.) In the 20ish years since I’ve read it, though, I’ve not read any of Warren’s other books until now.

This book follows a tobacco grower, Percy Munn, as he and other Southern landowners attempt to get a fair price for their tobacco. This involves a lot of wheeling and dealing in the good ol’ boys club - a big theme of ATKM, too - and eventually devolves into intimidating the men who won’t join the association by burning their crops. Munn moves from a somewhat sympathetic, though often passive, protagonist to a man who has compromised everything in his life and lost most, if not all, of it. Like Faulkner and other chroniclers of the post-Civil War South, Warren gives his rich white protagonists some dignity, but often shows how much their prestige and riches mislead them into disaster. Munn himself reminds me a great deal of Jack Burden, the narrator of ATKM, in terms of his introspection and his longing for some meaning beyond the life he lives. Though Burden got some measure of peace at the end, Munn has no such luck.

This is an excellent first novel, grappling with the subject matter and themes that Warren would master in his greatest book.

[Anthony Friscia · Rating 3 out of 5]

A peculiar book, and I’m not really sure I ‘get’ it. Set during the Tobacco Wars of the early 1900’s, when tobacco farmers in Kentucky fought to get better terms, and the violence escalated to the point where troops were brought in to keep the peace. It’s the story of a man who becomes part of the movement, seemingly without really knowing why. The book is told from his point of view, and there are long passages of his thought processes and observations. There are interesting characters, including one who goes on a chapter long digression about traveling west to hunt buffalo during the Indian Wars after the Civil War, although the main character himself isn’t particularly so. It’s supposedly a “classic of southern literature”, and for lack of a better term it feels ‘languid’ in that southern way at times. What caught me the most was the writing of the dialogue in various southern dialects, which take a bit to get used to, but paint a picture of the time. I’m not really sure I enjoyed the book, but I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

[Tucker Clack · Rating 4 out of 5]

RPW’s prose is one of one man. Feels like you just dropped acid while listening to your granddaddy talk about the way things used to be. Insane work for his first novel

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Robert Penn Warren's first novel (1939), and it's a corker. The subject matter--the violent disputes between tobacco growers and buyers in western Kentucky and Tennessee in the early 1900s--may sound boring, but the story of the main character, Percy Munn, and his gradual downward spiral from idealistic young lawyer to violent outlaw is gripping. I read it on the recommendation of Slate's podcast Trumpcast, which hosted a panel discussion about the book.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm in two minds about this one. It was written long ago, and as a historical novel at that, so all the period racism is likely accurate but doesn't make it any more enjoyable to read. It's also not my usual fare... basically, the Night Riders are a sort of emerging union of tobacco farmers who are trying to band together, with increasing levels of violence, in order to get better prices for their crops from tobacco companies. Being pro-union myself, this is something I would normally have sympathy for, but that violence - and I am aware that violence was a significant part of the union movement - makes nearly all the characters increasingly unsympathetic as they get sucked further and further into some really dodgy behaviour. And, you know, stories with unlikeable protagonists can be great, but there's so many of them here, and they're nearly all so unpleasant that I can't really bring myself to sympathise with any of them. The fall of the main character, initially presented as a decent man, is, I think I am supposed to feel, some sort of rural American tragedy, but after he hurts his wife the way he does he's no longer a tragedy to me, he's someone who is just plain irredeemable, and my opinion stands despite the technical accomplishment of what Warren's accomplished here, this sucking maelstrom of poor choices that just drags character after character down and down.

All that aside, I very nearly gave this four stars, because whatever my problems with the characters, the prose is just so accomplished. It slips down so easily that the book felt a whole lot shorter than its near 500 page count would credit. And this, I understand, is a first novel. Well, I was impressed... but it is flawed in a way that a lot of first novels are flawed, and for Warren and Night Rider that flaw comes in the ending. This increasingly claustrophobic story is interrupted, in the second to last chapter, by a really tedious digression that drops all momentum dead for me. The whole of this very long chapter is a minor character recounting his life as a buffalo hunter. It's so irrelevant, and it goes on for so long, and it's just adding one more unpleasant character to the rest as he goes on about slaughtering both buffalo and Native Americans, and all I could feel was relief when it was finally over and the wish that Warren had found it within himself to kill a darling, because if ever there was a time for such a killing, it was then.

Flawed but interesting. I plan to read Warren's All the King's Men soon, so I'm interested to see how it stacks up.

[David Allen Hines · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Penn Warren's All the Kings Men is of course his masterpiece, but Night Rider is much worth a read also. It was written close enough in time to the Tobacco Wars to be able to realistically describe them absent the reinterpretation of history, and despite it being among his earliest works, Warren's wonderfully descriptive writing and tone come through in a way no modern writer can match. This novel was published in 1939, and some wording and depictions are racial and may offend the delicate sensibilities of the modern politically correct, but they are an accurate depiction of the times. The only part of the novel I did not care for was the extended dialog of Proudfit in the last chapter, but the dramatic conclusion more than made up for that. It's a shame this book is not more widely available and read today than it once was. If you like All the Kings Men and want to learn some about a nearly forgotten part of history like the Tobacco Wars, Night Rider is worth a read.

[Rock · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are like I was and do not know anything about the Black Patch Wars, you should read this book and then you will know something. Or at least you will feel something, as Mr Penn Warren is a phenomenal painter of feelings.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had not realized until recently that Robert Penn Warren had written any novels other than All the King's Men. I thought that the rest of his work was stories and poetry. But he wrote several novels of which this was the first. You can see that he was already beginning to work out some of the themes of his later more famous book. As in All The King's Men, this is a story of a young idealistic man who is attracted to power and corrupted by it, but here the powerful and corrupt older men have little good in them. Bill Christian is an aggressive blow hard. Senator Tolliver is a fraud. Professor Ball is a hypocrite and a coward. And Dr. MacDonald, though a loyal friend, is completely amoral. So it's little surprise that Percy Munn's life as portrayed here is a long downward spiral. His wife, May, seems to be purely good, but he drives her away, and we don't meet another purely good character until Willie Proudfit at the end.

Percy Munn's downfall is a classic story of seduction and fall from grace. He is flattered by the older men who invite him into their inner circle, but only of course to serve their own ends. In the beginning he struggles against his baser urges for power and position, but quickly succumbs without much of a fight. It isn't long before the war with the tobacco monopolists turns ugly, and Mr. Munn signs up to become a night rider, first by destroying the tobacco seedlings of the farmers who won't sign up for the Association that opposes the big tobacco buyers, then burning the barns of uncooperating farmers and then blowing up the warehouses of the buyers. There are some obvious parallels to the Klan and to the violence in "Bloody Breathitt," a hundred miles to the east. Munn is given the job of executing a dishonest traitor, a man who as an attorney he had successfully defended against a murder charge. It turns out that the man was guilty of the earlier murder and is a generally horrible person, but he doesn't deserve death at the hands of vigilantes. Then Munn kills pursuing soldiers after the warehouse raid. He doesn't have to do it, but he is angered by the death of a foolish young man who had joined the raid. His wife leaves him, his house is burned, and he goes on the run when falsely accused of another murder that he didn't commit but would have, if he had had the chance. Oy! His life is a mess, but he brought it on himself, though I still thought that maybe there was a possibility for redemption through the example of Willie Proudfit.

I liked the portrayal of Kentucky tobacco farming. My grandfather was a Kentucky tobacco farmer, though he grew burley tobacco in the Bluegrass which, as a boy, I would have considered much superior to the dark fire cured tobacco of the Pennyroyal region described here. Still the people portrayed here and the farming culture felt a lot like home to me.

A curiosity of the narrative technique is Mr. Warren's decision to refer to his hero throughout the book as "Mr. Munn." In the beginning it helps to identify him as one of local gentry, but in its formality it also separates and isolates him. Then when he spirals out of control as a killer and a man on the run, the formal title becomes ironic.

[George Howe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Robert Penn Warren wrote my favorite book, so I wanted to read another of his novels. Reading Night Rider reminded me a bit of reading The Moviegoer. I could see the skill of the author, the novelist’s way of describing things and people in perceptive way, but the story didn’t feel like a culmination. It didn’t feel like more than the sum of its parts.

Percy Munn is the main character who begins the novel as an unsure-of-himself lawyer that doesn’t DO things as much as he gets pulled along. As he says himself, “I can’t figure myself out.” But that never changes. He is a mystery to himself from beginning to end, even as the reader slowly penetrates that mystery and sees Percy go from being inscrutable to fully corrupted by the end. In this way, you could say that the novel follows the gradual descent of its main character, much like Anna Karenina. But Percy’s passivity and interior confusion make him a hard character to feel strongly about. What are we to make of him? About halfway through the book, he chooses the dark side by killing a man and raping his wife. But before he plants his foot on the solid ground of evil, he’s a floating gray blob. He’s nothing like Jack Burden, the main character in Warren’s masterpiece, All the King’s Men. Jack goes through a philosophical transformation that increases his cynicism until he ultimately discards it in the end. All that time, he is vibrant and alive.

You could claim that Percy’s passivity is the point, that he allows himself to be associated with the tobacco growers and never has the strength, like Captain Todd, to leave the group when it becomes violent. But that interpretation would imply that Percy begins and ends the novel with no will of his own. But he kills Trevelyan and tries to kill the senator. He commits these actions out of no obligation or pressure.

When he decides to kill Senator Tolliver, it seems like he is trying to disprove Doctor MacDonald’s point, that whatever a man does “the thing was in him all the time.” Percy vehemently rejects this idea, probably because he still wants to become more than the lump that he is. He even admits to the senator during the murder attempt that he is “nothing” but he can become something by killing Tolliver. So is Munn just a Kentucky Raskolnikov? Not really. He has no obsession with this idea. It makes his failure to kill Tolliver and the approaching soldiers hard to decipher. Is his life proof of what MacDonald said, that he is just a man without something in him? Or is there some moral reason for his flinching in the end? He doesn’t die in a blaze of fury and he doesn’t repent. He dies at the end of the book the same way he begins the whole ordeal, a muddled mess.

[Drew Norwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

"But a man's that a'way. He sees sumthen, and don't reckon on no end, no way, and don't see hit a-come-en. They's a hoggishness in man, and a hog-blindness."

RPW's first novel. You can see the common elements in place even here that wold be replicated in most of his works--the isolated, bewildered protagonist, the slow-to-develop plot, the side-stories and histories of minor characters that give meaning on the main story (Bunk Treveleyan and Willie Proudfit), the poetic natural descriptions, the grounded man who serves as foil (Capt. Todd, Willie Proudfit). Warren’s plots are like steam engines, they are slow to gather speed but the coal is continually being shovels in and the effect comes in time. The last quarter of Night Riders (and this too goes for most his other novels) has a brilliance about it that sets it apart. The action and fulfillment hurdle forward but the reader is elevated above the action by some force within the writing itself. This novel had one of the most moving scenes, whether because it struck me just at the right time and in the right way, or because of the splendor of the passage itself:

"The drouth might come. The plants which they had placed in the ground might shrivel and wither there. Or next year the two men themselves might not be there. The place might be lost by that time. Willie Proudfit might be in Oklahoma, there was no telling. Sylvestus might be gone somewhere. But now their hoes rose and fell. They were moving down the field, imperceptibly, surely, as into their future. Beyond them, in other fields out of sight, other men were, and women in houses, and men in the street of the towns. He stared at the three figures so far below him in the field, suspended there in the wide, bright, brittle fullness of light, and he almost started up to call, to wave his arms, like a traveler lost in some desert country who sees far off, or thinks he sees, other men of his party moving confidently and serenely and unheedingly to disappear beyond some fold or abutment of the landscape, or into the distance. But he did not. He lay on the ground, with his head on his arms, shaken, suddenly, by that common scene below him….”

[MJ Beaufrand · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm calling it "read" even though I'm ditching it on p.400 out of 460. This was a toughy in so many ways. I wanted to take it on because lore had it that my own grandfather was a Night Rider, and I wanted to get a better look at what he might have gotten up to.

But the novel itself! N-words everywhere. Usually they came out in dialogue from uneducated white sharecroppers and not the main character, who's an attorney, but it still bothered me. And then they get to the part where I'm ditching it, around now, a tale from a Kentucky sharecropper whose daddy spent some time in Oklahoma, bragging about all the buffalo he shot and skinned. Sometimes as much as seventy-five a day, taking only the hides and the tongues and leaving the rest of the remains to rot.

Alas, the artistry is there. I love the way Warren has of making the landscape reflect Mr. Munn's emotional state at the time, but my ultimate review gives this a, "Gross. Didn't love it."

[Jeffrey Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Violence, betrayal, innocence, dignity—Night Rider tells a tale of the eternal struggle between money and justice. Based on history, the novel examines the interior life of a puzzled lawyer and his descent into a cause. The cause is worthwhile: organizing farmers to obtain a decent profit for their tobacco. The determination is admirable. But as big money buys off the politicians as well as individual farmers, desperation and even depravity sets in among the doomed farmers.
This feels like a bridge novel between classic and modern. It's more Faulkner than Hemingway. The prose is fluid and the 500 pages went fairly quickly. The contemporary reader may find the interior psychological examination overdone. Yet the scenes are vivid and it's a good reminder of the dichotomies that still plague America: Class war, anomie, discrimination, rural poverty, and a fight for justice.
Definitely worth reading.

[Ray · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book starts out well enough and tells a tale worth telling. The lead character takes some unfortunate turns and winds up finding himself in a set of circumstances he likely never imagined. He finds himself questioning many of the assumptions that made his life to that point; to the point that he becomes a version of the uprooted plants that become a prop in this story.

Warren comes from a time and culture where awful racism is expected, and he does not blink from it in his story, though it is not central to it, either. Where I fault Warren is that around 80% of the book he takes the story into a strange narrative direction as confusing as the last 20 minutes of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's awfully confusing and adds nothing for the reader. It's a big let-down to read this story and then have it fizzle out.

[Terena Bell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth the read if you're a big Penn Warren fan or interested in the Night Rider Tobacco War in general. It reads like a first novel, though -- because it is one. From a literary criticism perspective, it's interesting to see how themes here surface in other Penn Warren work, as well as look at how parts of his style were already clearly manifested in the author's youth. It's like a window on the talent he one day would become.

[Cliff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think I've ever more vivid writing. Warren has stunning command of his craft. There are passages that are so beautifully done that you pause and read them again. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry (2). Find out why. Read him.

[Bonnie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Stopped reading. A novel about the tobacco wars at the turn of the twentieth century.

[Michael Cameron Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of folks don’t die happy.

[Tim McKay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book starts like a too of the the class and then becomes a bore.

[Susan Braun · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite my high expectations in the beginning, this was the most dreary and dismal book I ever forced myself to finish.

[Florence Renouard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dans le Sud des Etats-Unis, au début du XXème siècle, les plaies laissées par la Guerre de Sécession ne sont pas refermées. Le Kentucky vit principalement de la culture du tabac, et les producteurs ont bien du mal à s’en sortir face à la baisse des prix imposée par le Trust des acheteurs. La crise fait renaître les vieux antagonismes Nord/Sud, les puissants du Nord contre les petits planteurs du Sud.

Menés par le Sénateur Tolliver entre autres, les producteurs décident de fonder une coopérative : l’Association des planteurs de tabac. Percy Mumm, jeune avocat, rejoint l’association. Mais très vite, pour intimider et punir les planteurs qui acceptent de vendre aux prix dérisoires imposés par le trust, l’association crée une sorte de milice : les Cavaliers de la nuit. Ces derniers mènent des raids nocturnes (incendies des hangars, destruction des plants, violences physiques). Percy Mumm, nommé à la tête d’un de ces groupes, bascule dans la spirale de la violence…

Le contexte du roman est très intéressant : ancré dans un Sud rendu exsangue et revanchard par la guerre civile, on assiste à la naissance du capitalisme et de l’empire de l’économie du tabac. L’engagement politique est incarné par Percy Mumm, personnage principal du roman. Au début de l'histoire, c’est un jeune homme plutôt passif, qui se laisse porter, pousser par les autres : il semble lui-même surpris par le discours exalté qu’il improvise pour enrôler les planteurs. Même s’il devient un des leaders du mouvement et gagne donc en épaisseur romanesque, Percy reste comme étranger à sa propre vie. Cela se ressent dans ses difficultés à mener une vie de couple. C’est en outre un homme déchiré par ses contradictions, oscillant entre la justice inhérente à son métier d’avocat, et la justice expéditive des justiciers autoproclamés.

Une multitude de personnages gravitent autour de lui, issus de toutes les catégories sociales vivant dans le Kentucky, et font du roman un excellent témoignage sur l’époque.

Décrites également avec beaucoup de précisions, les scènes de réunions ou meetings politiques, les raids de nuit sont très cinématographiques : on a facilement les images dans la tête !

Saluons le travail de Michel Mohrt qui a magnifiquement traduit le lyrisme de l’écriture de Robert Penn Warren, auteur qui a obtenu deux prix Pulitzer pour son œuvre poétique, en plus de celui qu’il a remporté pour l’excellent Tous les hommes du Roi.

Un grand merci aux éditions Séguier de nous permettre des découvrir le premier roman de ce très grand auteur américain, trop méconnu encore.

[keatssycamore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three if not for the ending. I love the ending (minus the chapter with all the dialect about Willie Proudfit).

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not my favorite of his books but can really relate it to current topics as far as constitutional rights