Literary Picks Night Rider

Author: Edward Pickering

Robert Penn Warren, poet, novelist and critic is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "All the King's Men." Based on the career of Louisiana politician Huey Long, the novel portrays idealistic characters corrupted by power. Highly dramatic, it proves an irresistible read. Its very success, however, has relegated Warren's first novel, "Night Rider," to a literary purgatory. Rarely read, rarely published, "Night Rider" suffers in comparison to its more famous and, admittedly, more polished successor. Nevertheless, "Night Rider" stands in its own right as a superb debut novel.

Thrilling, veined with rich descriptions and penetrating psychological observation, "Night Rider" rushes through you like a ghostly steed encountered in the dead of night. The novel is set in eastern Kentucky in the early years of last century. Tobacco dominates this agrarian society, comprised of independent farmers like the protagonist Percy Munn, who also keeps a law practice in nearby Bardsville. Through his friendship with several men, Munn gets assumed into the Board of the newly formed "Association of Growers of Dark Fired Tobacco," an organization devised to combat the exploitative tobacco purchasers who, at the time of the novel, had carved eastern Kentucky into regions in which each exercised monopolistic control. "Assumed" seems the appropriate word, for Munn takes neither an active nor passive role in his elevation: he struggles to understand why he joined the Association. Throughout the novel Munn wrestles with notions of individual existence and volition, both his own and others'. Munn is fascinated by men who are self-sustaining, men who live by a positive, passionate force that emanates from within - Munn himself has no guiding principles to live by, merely a series of unanswered questions.

Intelligent and dependable, Munn emerges as a leader of the Association, but never as a policy maker. Essentially, Munn enacts and serves the ideals of others, a fact he realizes toward the end when his life is irreparably shattered by the violence the Association instigated. Shaken by defection, the Association, while still maintaining its legal front, goes underground. Masked men - night riders - roam in darkness, burning crops and homes, intimidating farmers and, in isolated instances, simply killing.

The novel's great irony is that Munn, in the service of an ideal, ends up compromising everything good and decent in his life. Munn lives by the false words of a onetime friend:

"And this is something one must learn in the rough and tumble of politics. Which compromises to make, for all life is a compromise with the ideal, but at the same time to move toward the ideal and never to lose sight of it or lose the grasp of it in one's thoughts."

Munn's descent into darkness and violence is rendered, in prose, clean and sharp. Munn's psychological examination of himself and those around him is brilliant; the events themselves charged with drama. At times galvanizing, at times serene and quieting, "Night Rider" deserves a place among Warren's best works.