This bridge only leads in one direction: to awards conferred upon Stephen King. And straight from central casting, Harold Bloom emerged as the perfect foil to the popularizers, grumbling that King writes “what used to be called penny dreadfuls.” In his acceptance speech, King acted as the peacemaker, magnanimously hoping that the “award means that a bridge can be built between so-called popular fiction and so-called literary fiction.” The speech is called “Building Bridges.” You can purchase it on Amazon. Freedman wrote an essay called “Stephen King Deserves Award for Creating Readers,” attributing to King heretofore unknown divine powers. Lev Grossman in Time celebrated the overthrow of the Western canon. This event was an opportunity to prove to the public that you were not a snob. With serious literature (or at least the chimerical “idea” of it) thus idily quarantined to a few fusty English departments, the noble fight to reclaim writing for the people could commence, a struggle that reached a rhetorical peak in 2003, when King was honored with the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
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Even the New York Times, which had once tagged him as a “writer of fairly engaging and preposterous claptrap,” was now affording him his rightful seat as an heir to Victor Hugo and James Joyce. And, mirabile dictu, at last intellectual snobbery buckled under King’s passion and perseverance, and he began to receive overdue accolades: publication in the New Yorker, an O’Henry Award for the year’s best short story. Yet King was undeterred by elitist prejudices, and girded by the unflagging support of his Constant Readers and a conviction in the democracy of the tale, he continued to write on his own terms. Still, the literary establishment turned up its nose. Owing to the visual nature of his prose, great film directors used his material for memorable adaptations, and more and more readers came to appreciate his work. Though first ignored by publishing houses as a mere spinner of schlock, King eventually sold a novel called Carriein 1974, and readers embraced it.
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King was mesmerized by the raw emotions these stories accessed in him, and while working as a high school teacher, he began writing in the same direct and vivid style. Stephen King was raised in humble circumstances in rural New England and first encountered fiction in the pulps, Weird Tales, and Analog Science Fiction.
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Life is good under the dome, because King is a benevolent man with a disarming, aw-shucks demeanor-in his Entertainment Weekly column, he goes by the handle “Uncle Stevie”-but nevertheless he’s the boss of this enclosed world and its focal point it exists to accommodate him.įrom this hothouse environment, a biography has grown like kudzu, and it goes like this. Inside is a thriving little community maintained by a cottage industry, an industry founded on the writing and celebrity of Stephen King. A dome has settled over a small town in Maine.