Huey Long

Character Key Number: 
382
Display Name: 
Huey Long
Sort Name: 
Long, Huey
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?: 
No
Biography: 

Huey Pierce Long Jr. served as the governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and was a member of the United States Senate from 1932 until his assassination in 1935. The narrator of "Knight's Gambit" compares Harriss to him for wanting to build an expensive concrete road that he himself would never use "just as Huey Long in Louisiana had made himself founder owner and supporter of what his uncle said was one of the best literary magazines anywhere, without ever once looking in-side it probably nor even caring what the people who wrote and edited it thought of him" (241). In "By the People" Long is mentioned again, when Stevens compares Clarence Snopes to him, calling Long "a madman" as if he were still alive long after his assassination (137). That story refers to "Long's soak-the-rich battle cries" (132); the most famous of these was 'Every man a king.' Long is mentioned again, three times, in The Mansion. (The magazine Faulkner refers to is the Louisiana Progress.)