This volume brings together a variety of perspectives on King's contribution to American literature and popular culture. New essays discuss King's attempts to straddle the gap between popular fiction and serious literature and the inspiration of Robert Browning and T.S. Eliot in King's Dark Tower series. Previously published essays explore the tensions between fantasy and reality across King's work, his link to American gothic and romance traditions, and his fortunes among book reviewers, academics, and his peers and readers.

On Stephen King / --Biography of Stephen King / -- The Paris review perspective / -- The popularity problem : Stephen King's cultural context / -- Stephen King's critical reception / -- Writers and metafiction in three Stephen King texts / -- The dark tower : Steven King's revision of Browning and Eliot / -- Surviving the ride / -- King and the critics / -- Do the dead sing? / -- King, his world, and its characters / -- Taking Stephen King seriously : reflections on a decade of best-sellers / -- The struggle for personal morality in America / -- Toward defining an American Gothic : Stephen King and the romance tradition / -- Technohorror : the dystopian vision of Stephen King / -- The ending is only the beginning : genre and its influence on climax / -- A blind date with disaster : adolescent revolt in the fiction of Stephen King / -- Cotton Mather and Stephen King : writing/righting the body politic / -- The prisoner, the pen, and the number one fan : Misery as a prison film / Mary Findley. On Stephen King -- Biography of Stephen King -- The Paris review perspective -- The popularity problem : Stephen King's cultural context -- Stephen King's critical reception -- Writers and metafiction in three Stephen King texts -- The dark tower : Steven King's revision of Browning and Eliot -- Surviving the ride -- King and the critics -- Do the dead sing? -- King, his world, and its characters -- Taking Stephen King seriously : reflections on a decade of best-sellers -- The struggle for personal morality in America -- Toward defining an American Gothic : Stephen King and the romance tradition -- Technohorror : the dystopian vision of Stephen King -- The ending is only the beginning : genre and its influence on climax -- A blind date with disaster : adolescent revolt in the fiction of Stephen King -- Cotton Mather and Stephen King : writing/righting the body politic -- The prisoner, the pen, and the number one fan : Misery as a prison film.