I haven’t read All the King’s Men but I have a copy and it’s on my to-read stack. I suppose I ought to bump it up (although right now I am reading I’ll Take My Stand, which has an essay by Warren in it).

As far as Faulkner goes, the three you’ve named are certainly what most people would consider his greatest novels (and I particularly love Absalom, Absalom!), but to be honest, they’re also honestly dense, difficult and inaccessible. Worth it, absolutely–those novels will pay you back a thousandfold–but nevertheless dense, difficult and inaccessible.

I’d advise you to mix in some of the more reader-friendly works of his like The Reivers, A Light In August or The Hamlet. They’re also tremendously complex and rewarding novels, but just as a practical matter they are easier reads, and accordingly they more forgiving entrypoints to Yoknapatawpha County.

And, for what it’s worth, my favorite is Go Down, Moses, which is an amazing and profound novel masquerading as a collection of short stories.

Have you ever read All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren? I read it last year and loved it. It’s another great book set in the South. It has some of the most beautiful prose and some of the deepest, profoundest thoughts on human nature that I have ever read. It’s ostensibly about the corrupt governor Willie Stark, but I think it’s really more about what it means to be human.

I wanted to post him first, but had to wait for today.