Getting Biblical in Daily Life
1 Kings is—together with Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 2 Kings—part of the Deuteronomic history. We're pretty sure they were all written by the same dudes (the Dude-eronomists) around 550 BCE when the Jews lived mostly as captives in Babylon. It's hard to tell when we're reading the Bible in English, but the dudes wrote using a very distinctive style.
The purpose of all of these books is to show that the reason for all of Israel's problems (culminating in their current no-expenses-paid Babylonian vacation) was disobedience to God and his commandments. So in 1st Kings, the stories focus on the kings's religious faithfulness (or, more frequently, lack thereof) rather than focusing on their military or political exploits (though there's plenty of that, too). The idea was that 1 Kings and its companion books would give the captive Israelites hope that if they were faithful to the Lord he would get them out of Babylon one way or another. Duuude. (Source.)