The Writing of Stephen King Essay -- Literature, Writers

Steven King has long been known as one of the greatest authors of all time. He has been labeled "the King of Horror" and won many awards including the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, 6 Bram Stoker awards, 6 Horror Guild awards, 5 Locus Awards, 3 World Fantasy Awards (including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004), the 1996 O. Henry award, a Hugo Award in 1982 for the non-fiction Danse Macabre. He was given a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003 by the Horror Writers' Association and, controversially, a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2003. Upon giving the Medal to King the National Book Foundation said, But to every comment there is always a critc that has something negative to say, like Harold Bloom for instance who stated, Another critic, from norwaywrites.com, wrote in a similar sense talking about how Kings works are to the point of being unpublishable. He states, My senior Creative Writing professor in college, a National Book Award winning author, brought into us during a lecture on basic prose and readability a chapter excerpt from Stephen King's newest book at the time, Cell, and without telling us who wrote it asked us to read it and discuss. None of us had read the book yet, because apparently a college education is enough to scare people away from second rate penny stock fiction. We hated it. We marked it up, took it apart, rewrote it, and more or less declared it unpublishable before our professor informed us that it was in the New York Times Bestseller list and had already made more money than all of our college loans combined. He also states that his writings are atrocious and that "the Uncle Scrooge-esque money vault that he s... ...s he commits. This fact is only reinforced when Norton discovers Andy's bible in the safe. On the inside of the cover Andy writes, "Dear Warden, you were right. Salvation lay within. Andy Dufresne." As Norton opens the bible to the book of Exodus it is revealed that the bible had held Andy's rock hammer. The book of Exodus lends itself to Andy's own freeing of himself and the truth as Moses freed himself and the slaves. King implements a certain belief in a holy spirit so that it brings into the book that not necessarily everything is in our hands. By using this and the previously mentioned reference to blasphemies, King relates the story back to the reader. He shows that the main character is not someone out of the ordinary but a normal average person. This is what makes his horror novels scary and his other novels almost real, as mentioned in the opening paragraphs.