Ebook: At Heaven's Gate

The second novel by Robert Penn Warren, author of the Pulizter-Prize-winning All The King's Men, is a tour de force and a neglected classic.

At Heaven's Gate, Robert Penn Warren's second novel, is a neglected classic of twentieth-century fiction. First published in 1943, it grew out of the author's years in Nashville during a period of political and financial scandals much like those later so memorably portrayed his Pulitzer-Prize-winning All The King's Men. Other formative elements, as he has said, "came originally out of Dante by a winding path." During the winter of 1939-40 in Rome, where the first half of the book was written, one of the most touching characters, a "Christ-bit mountaineer," and his part of the story literally came full-blown to the author in a typhus-induced delirium. At Heaven's Gate is a novel of violence, of human beings struggling against a fate beyond their power to alter, of corruption, and of honor. It is the story of Sue Murdock, the daughter of...