American Literature books summary

American Literature books summary

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

off Marvin Frey. Jack goes to the Governor's Mansion the night the deal is

made, and finds Willie a drunken wreck; Willie insults and threatens Gummy

Larson, and throws a drink in Tiny Dufiy's face. Tom continues to spiral

out of control. He gets in a fight with some yokels at a bar, and is

suspended for the game against Georgia, which the team loses. Two games

later, Tom is injured in the game against Tech, and is carried off the

field unconscious. Willie watches the rest of the game, which State wins

easily, then goes to the hospital to check on Tom. Jack goes back to the

offce, where he finds Sadie Burke sitting alone in the dark, apparently

very upset. Sadie leaves when Jack tells her about Tom's injury, then calls

from the hospital to tell Jack to come over right away.

Jack goes to the hospital, where the Boss sends him to pick up Lucy. Jack

does so, and upon their arrival they learn that the specialist Adam Stanton

called in to look at Tom has been held up by fog in Baltimore. Willie is

frantic, but eventually the specialist arrives. His diagnosis matches

Adam's: Tom has fractured two vertebrae, and the two doctors recommend a

risky surgery to see if the damage can be repaired. They undertake the

surgery, and Willie, Jack, and Lucy wait. Willie tells Lucy that he plans

to name the hospital after Tom, but Lucy says that things like that don't

matter. At six o'clock in the morning, Adam returns, and tells the group

that Tom will live, but that his spinal cord is crushed, and he will be

paralyzed for the rest of his life. Lucy takes Willie home, and Jack calls

Anne with the news. The operation was accomplished just before dawn on

Sunday. On Monday, Jack sees the piles of telegrams that have come into the

offce from political allies and well-wishers, and talks to the obsequious

Tiny. When Willie comes in, he declares to Tiny that he is canceling Gummy

Larson's contract. He implies that he plans to change the way things are

done at the capital. Jack is taking some tax-bill figures to the Senate

when he learns that Sadie has just stormed out of the offce, and receives

word that Anne has just called with an urgent message.

Jack goes to see Anne, who says that Adam has learned about her

relationship with Willie, and believes the afiair to be the reason he was

given the directorship of the hospital. She tells Jack that Willie has

broken off the afiair because he plans to go back to his wife. She asks

Jack to find Adam and tell him that that isn't the way things happened.

Jack spends the day trying to track down Adam, but he fails to find him.

That night, Jack is paged to go to the Capitol, where the vote on the tax

bill is taking place. Here, Jack greets Sugar-Boy and watches the Boss talk

to his political hangers-on. The Boss tells Jack that he wants to tell him

something. As they walk across the lobby, they see a rain-and-mud-soaked

Adam Stanton leaning against the pedestal of a statue. Willie reaches out

his hand to shake Adam's; in a blur, Adam draws a gun and shoots Willie,

then is shot himself by Sugar-Boy and a highway patrolman. Jack runs to

Adam, who is already dead.

Willie survives for a few days, and at first the prognosis from the

hospital is that he will recover. But then he catches an infection, and

Jack realizes that he is going to die. Just before the end, he summons Jack

to his hospital bed, where he says over and over again that everything

could have been difierent.

After he dies, he is given a massive funeral. Jack says that the other

funeral he went to that week was quite difierent: it was Adam Stanton's

funeral at Burden's Landing.

Chapter 10 Summary

After Adam's funeral and Willie's funeral, Jack spends some time in

Burden's Landing, spending his days quietly with Anne. They never discuss

Willie's death or Adam's death; instead they sit wordlessly together, or

Jack reads aloud from a book. Then one day Jack begins to wonder how Adam

learned about Anne and Willie's afiair. He asks her, but she says she does

not know-- a man called and told him, but she does not know who it was.

Jack goes to visit Sadie Burke in the sanitarium where she has gone to

recover her nerves. She tells Jack that Tiny Dufiy (now the governor of the

state) was the man who called Adam; and she confesses that Tiny learned

about the afiair from her. She was so angry about Willie leaving her to go

back to Lucy that she told Tiny out of revenge, knowing that, by doing so,

she was all but guaranteeing Willie's death. Jack blames Tiny rather than

Sadie, and Sadie agrees to make a statement which Jack can use to bring

about Tiny's downfall.

A week later, Dufiy summons Jack to see him. He offers Jack his job back,

with a substantial raise over Jack's already substantial income. Jack

refuses, and tells Tiny he knows about his role in Willie's death. Tiny is

stunned, and frightened, and when Jack leaves he feels heroic. But his

feeling of moral heroism quickly dissolves into an acidic bitterness,

because he realizes he is trying to make Tiny the sole villain as a way of

denying his own share of responsibility. Jack withdraws into numbness, not

even opening a letter from Anne when he receives it. He receives a letter

from Sadie with her statement, saying that she is moving away and that she

hopes Jack will let matters drop--Tiny has no chance to win the next

gubernatorial election anyway, and if Jack pursues the matter Anne's name

will be dragged through the mud. But Jack had already decided not to pursue

it.

At the library Jack sees Sugar-Boy, and asks him what he would do if he

learned that there was a man besides Adam who was responsible for Willie's

death. Sugar-Boy says he would kill him, and Jack nearly tells him about

Tiny's role. But he decides not to at the last second, and instead tells

Sugar-Boy that it was a joke. Jack also goes to see Lucy, who has adopted

Sibyl Frey's child, which she believes is Tom's. She tells Jack that Tom

died of pneumonia shortly after the accident, and that the baby is the only

thing that enabled her to live. She also tells him that she believes--and

has to believe--that Willie was a great man. Jack says that he also

believes it.

Jack goes to visit his mother at Burden's Landing, where he learns that she

is leaving Theodore Murrell, the Young Executive. He is surprised to learn

that she is doing so because she loved Judge Irwin all along. This

knowledge changes Jack's long-held impression of his mother as a woman

without a heart, and helps to shatter his belief in the Great Twitch. At

the train station, he lies to his mother, and tells her that Judge Irwin

killed himself not because of anything that Jack did, but because of his

failing health. He thinks of this lie as his last gift to her.

After his mother leaves, he goes to visit Anne, and tells her the truth

about his parentage. Eventually, he and Anne are married, and in the early

part of 1939, when Jack is writing his story, they are living in Judge

Irwin's house in Burden's Landing. The Scholarly Attorney, now frail and

dying, lives with them. Jack is working on a book about Cass Mastern, whom

he believes he can finally understand. After the old man dies and the book

is finished, Jack says, he and Anne will leave Burden's Landing--stepping

"out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time."

CATCH-22

(Joseph Heller)

SOME INFO ON JOSEPH HELLER

b. May 1, 1923, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.

American writer whose novel Catch-22 (1961) was one of the most

significant works of protest literature to appear after World War II. The

satirical novel was both a critical and a popular success, and a film

version appeared in 1970.Heller flew 60 combat missions as a bombardier

with the U.S. Air Force in Europe. He received an M.A. at Columbia

University in 1949 and was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Oxford

(1949-50). He taught English at Pennsylvania State University (1950-52) and

worked as an advertising copywriter for the magazines Time (1952-56) and

Look (1956-58) and as promotion manager for McCall's (1958-61), meanwhile

writing Catch-22 in his spare time. The plot of the novel centres on the

antihero Captain John Yossarian, stationed at an airstrip on a

Mediterranean island in World War II, and portrays his desperate attempts

to stay alive. The "catch" in Catch-22 involves a mysterious Air Force

regulation, which asserts that a man is considered insane if he willingly

continues to fly dangerous combat missions; but, if he makes the necessary

formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the

request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. The

term Catch-22 thereafter entered the English language as a reference to a

proviso that trips one up no matter which way one turns.His later novels

including Something Happened (1974), an unrelievedly pessimistic novel,

Good as Gold (1979), a satire on life in Washington, D.C., and God Knows

(1984), a wry, contemporary-vernacular monologue in the voice of the

biblical King David, were less successful. Closing Time, a sequel to Catch-

22, appeared in 1994. Heller's dramatic work includes the play We Bombed in

New Haven (1968).

CONTEXT

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. He served as an Air Force

bombardier in World War II, and has enjoyed a long career as a writer and a

teacher. His bestselling books include Something Happened, Good as Gold,

Picture This, God Knows, and Closing Time--but his first novel, Catch-22,

remains his most famous and acclaimed work.

Written while Heller worked producing ad copy for a New York City

marketing firm, Catch-22 draws heavily on Heller's Air Force experience,

and presents a war story that is at once hilarious, grotesque, bitterly

cynical, and utterly stirring. The novel generated a great deal of

controversy upon its publication; critics tended either to adore it or

despise it, and those who hated it did so for the same reason as the

critics who loved it. Over time, Catch-22 has become one of the defining

novels of the twentieth century. It presents an utterly unsentimental

vision of war, stripping all romantic pretense away from combat, replacing

visions of glory and honor with a kind of nightmarish comedy of violence,

bureaucracy, and paradoxical madness.

Unlike other anti-romantic war novels, such as Remarque's All Quiet on

the Western Front, Catch-22 relies heavily on humor to convey the insanity

of war, presenting the horrible meaninglessness of armed conflict through a

kind of desperate absurdity, rather than through graphic depictions of

suffering and violence. Catch-22 also distinguishes itself from other anti-

romantic war novels by its core values: Yossarian's story is ultimately not

one of despair, but one of hope; the positive urge to live and to be free

can redeem the individual from the dehumanizing machinery of war. The novel

is told as a disconnected series of loosely related, tangential stories in

no particular chronological order; the final narrative that emerges from

this structural tangle upholds the value of the individual in the face of

the impersonal, collective military mass; at every stage, it mocks

insincerity and hypocrisy even when they appear to be triumphant.

SUMMARY FOR "CATCH-22"

Chapters 1-5

Yossarian is in a military hospital in Italy with a liver condition

that isn't quite jaundice. He is not really even sick, but he prefers the

hospital to the war outside, so he pretends to have a pain in his liver.

The doctors are unable to prove him wrong, so they let him stay, perplexed

at his failure to develop jaundice. Yossarian shares the hospital ward with

his friend Dunbar; a bandaged, immobile man called the soldier in white;

and a pair of nurses Yossarian suspect hate him. One day an affable Texan

is brought into the ward, where he tries to convince the other patients

that "decent folk" should get extra votes. The Texan is so nice that

everyone hates him. A chaplain comes to see Yossarian, and although he

confuses the chaplain badly during their conversation, Yossarian is filled

with love for him. Less than ten days after the Texan is sent to the ward,

everyone but the soldier in white flees the ward, recovering from their

ailments and returning to active duty.

Outside the hospital there is a war going on, and millions of boys are

bombing each other to death. No one seems to have a problem with this

arrangement except Yossarian, who once argued with Clevinger, an officer in

his group, about the war. Yossarian claimed that everyone was trying to

kill him. Clevinger argued that no one was trying to kill Yossarian

personally, but Yossarian has no patience for Clevinger's talk of countries

and honor and insists that they are trying to kill him. After being

released from the hospital, Yossarian sees his roommate Orr and notices

that Clevinger is still missing. He remembers the last time he and

Clevinger called each other crazy, during a night at the officers' club

when Yossarian announced to everyone present that he was superhuman because

no one had managed to kill him yet. Yossarian is suspicious of everyone

when he gets out of the hospital; he has a meal in Milo's mess hall, then

talks to Doc Daneeka, who enrages Yossarian by telling him that Colonel

Cathcart has raised to fifty the number of missions required before a

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