Editing Stephen King (section)

== Reception and influence ==
=== Critical reception ===
King has been praised for his use of realistic detail. In ''A Century of Great Suspense Stories'', editor [[Jeffery Deaver]] wrote that "While there were many good best-selling writers before him, King, more than anybody since [[John D. MacDonald]], brought reality to genre novels. He has often remarked that ''[['Salem's Lot]]'' was {{'}}''[[Peyton Place (novel)|Peyton Place]]'' meets ''[[Dracula]]''{{'}}. And so it was. The rich characterization, the careful and caring social eye, the interplay of story line and character development announced that writers could take worn themes such as vampirism and make them fresh again. Before King, many popular writers found their efforts to make their books serious blue-penciled by their editors. 'Stuff like that gets in the way of the story,' they were told. Well, it's stuff like that that has made King so popular, and helped free the popular name from the shackles of simple genre writing. He is a master of masters."<ref name=":Deaver">{{cite book|title=A Century of Great Suspense Stories|editor-first=Jeffrey|editor-last=Deaver|page=[https://archive.org/details/centuryofgreatsu00deav/page/290 290]|publisher=Berkley Hardcover|date=2001|isbn=0-425-18192-8|url=https://archive.org/details/centuryofgreatsu00deav/page/290}}</ref> [[Daniel Mendelsohn]], reviewing ''[[Bag of Bones]]'', wrote that "Stephen King is so widely accepted as America's master of paranormal terrors that you can forget his real genius is for the everyday... This is a book about reanimation: the ghosts', of course, but also Mike's, his desire to re-embrace love and work after a long bereavement that King depicts with an eye for the kind of small but moving details that don't typically distinguish blockbuster horror novels."<ref>{{Cite news |last=Mendelsohn |first=Daniel |date=September 27, 1998 |title=Familiar Terrors |work=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/27/books/familiar-terrors.html}}</ref>

Many critics argue that King has matured as a writer. In his analysis of post–World War II horror fiction, ''The Modern Weird Tale'' (2001), [[S. T. Joshi]] devotes a chapter to King's work. Joshi argues that King's best-known works are his worst, describing them as mostly bloated, illogical, maudlin and prone to ''[[deus ex machina]]'' endings. Despite these criticisms, Joshi argues that since ''[[Gerald's Game]]'' (1992), King has been tempering the worst of his writing faults, producing books that are leaner, more believable and generally better written.<ref name="Joshi">{{cite book |last1=Joshi |first1=S. T. |author1-link=S T Joshi |title=The Modern Weird Tale |date=2001 |publisher=McFarland |location=Jefferson, N.C. |isbn=9780786409860 |pages=62–95 |chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/modernweirdtale0000josh/page/62 |chapter-url-access=registration|chapter=Stephen King: The King's New Clothes}}</ref>

In 2003, King was honored by the [[National Book Award]]s with a lifetime achievement award, the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Some in the literary community expressed disapproval of the award: [[Richard E. Snyder]], the former CEO of [[Simon & Schuster]], described King's work as "non-literature" and critic [[Harold Bloom]] denounced the choice: "The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for 'distinguished contribution' to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of [[dumbing down]] our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of [[penny dreadful]]s, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with [[Edgar Allan Poe]]. What he is<!--not a mistake--> is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis."<ref>{{Cite news | url=http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2003/09/24/dumbing_down_american_readers/ | newspaper=[[The Boston Globe]] | title=Dumbing down American readers | first=Harold | last=Bloom | date=September 24, 2003 | access-date=December 29, 2006 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060617015302/http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2003/09/24/dumbing_down_american_readers/ | archive-date=June 17, 2006 | url-status=dead }}</ref>
	
King acknowledged the controversy in his acceptance speech: "There are some people who have spoken out passionately about giving me this medal. There are some people who think it's an extraordinarily bad idea. There have been some people who have spoken out who think it's an extraordinarily good idea. You know who you are and where you stand and most of you who are here tonight are on my side. I'm glad for that. But I want to say it doesn't matter in a sense which side you were on. The people who speak out, speak out because they are passionate about the book, about the word, about the page and, in that sense, we're all brothers and sisters. Give yourself a hand."<ref name="NBA"/> [[Shirley Hazzard]], whose novel ''[[The Great Fire (Hazzard novel)|The Great Fire]]'' was that year's National Book Award winner, responded by criticizing King; she later said that she had never read him.<ref>{{Cite news |date=2003|title=Stephen King makes a prize call for populism |work=The Guardian|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/21/usnationalbookawards.awardsandprizes}}</ref>

[[Roger Ebert]] wrote that "A lot people were outraged when he was honored at the National Book Awards, as if a popular writer couldn't be taken seriously. But after finding that his book ''On Writing'' has more useful and observant things to say about the craft than any book since [[William Strunk Jr.|Strunk]] and [[E. B. White|White]]'s ''[[The Elements of Style]]'', I have gotten over my own snobbery. King has, after all, been responsible for the movies ''[[The Shawshank Redemption]]'', [[The Green Mile (film)|''The Green Mile'']], ''[[The Dead Zone (film)|The Dead Zone]]'', ''[[Misery (film)|Misery]]'', ''[[Apt Pupil (film)|Apt Pupil]]'', ''[[Christine (1983 film)|Christine]]'', ''[[Hearts in Atlantis (film)|Hearts in Atlantis]]'', ''[[Stand by Me (film)|Stand By Me]]'' and ''[[Carrie (1976 film)|Carrie]]''... And we must not be ungrateful for ''[[Silver Bullet (film)|Silver Bullet]]'', which I awarded three stars because it was 'either the worst movie made from a Stephen King story, or the funniest', and you know which side of that I'm gonna come down on."<ref>{{Cite news |last=Ebert |first=Roger |date=March 12, 2004 |title=Secret Window |work=[[Chicago Sun-Times]] |url=https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/secret-window-2004}}</ref>

=== Appraisal by other authors ===
[[Cynthia Ozick]] said that, upon giving a reading with King, "It dawned on me as I listened to him that, never mind all the best sellers and all the stereotypes -- this man is a genuine, true-born ''writer'', and that was a revelation. He is not Tom Clancy. He writes sentences, and he has a literary focus, and his writing is filled with literary history. It's not glib, it's not just contemporary chatter and it's not stupid -- that's a bad way to say that something's smart, but that's what I mean."<ref name=":Dubner"/> 

[[Joyce Carol Oates]] praised King's [[sense of place]]: "His fiction is famously saturated with the atmosphere of Maine; much of his mostly vividly imagined work—''[[Salem's Lot]]'', ''[[Dolores Claiborne]]'', the elegantly composed story '[[The Reach]]', for instance—is a poetic evocation of that landscape, its history and its inhabitants."<ref name=":Oates"/> Oates included the latter story in the second edition of ''The Oxford Book of American Short Stories''.<ref>{{Cite book |title=The Oxford Book of American Short Stories |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2013 |editor-last=Oates |editor-first=Joyce Carol |edition=2nd |pages=707}}</ref>

[[Peter Straub]] compared King favorably to [[Charles Dickens]]: "Both are novelists of vast popularity and enormous bibliographies, both are beloved writers with a pronounced taste for the morbid and grotesque, both display a deep interest in the underclass."<ref>{{Cite news |last=Ciabattari |first=Jane |date=October 31, 2014 |title=Is Stephen King a great writer? |work=BBC Culture |url=https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20141031-is-stephen-king-a-great-writer}}</ref> Straub included King's short story "[[That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French]]" in the [[Library of America]] anthology ''[[American Fantastic Tales]]''.<ref>{{Cite book |title= [[American Fantastic Tales]] |publisher=[[Library of America]] |year=2009 |editor-last=Straub |editor-first=Peter |pages=406}}</ref>

[[David Foster Wallace]] assigned ''[[Carrie (novel)|Carrie]]'' and ''[[The Stand]]'' while teaching at [[Illinois State University]]. Wallace praised King's ear for dialogue: "He's one of the first people to talk about real Americans and how they live, to capture real American dialogue in all its, like, foulmouthed grandeur... He has a deadly ear for the way people speak... Students come to me and a lot of them have been led to believe that there's good stuff and bad stuff, literary books and popular books, stuff that's redemptive and commercial shit—with a sharp line drawn between the two categories. It's good to show them that there's a certain amount of blurring. Surface-wise, King's work is a bit televisual, but there's really a lot going on."<ref name=":Singer" />

=== Influence ===
In an interview, [[Sherman Alexie]] recalls the influence of "Stephen King, who was always writing about underdogs, and bullied kids, and kids fighting back against overwhelming, often supernatural forces... The world aligned against them. As an Indian boy growing up on a reservation, I always identified with his protagonists. Stephen King, fighting the monsters."<ref>{{Cite news |last=Mack |first=Sammy |date=November 19, 2013 |title=Author Sherman Alexie Talks Young Adult Fiction and Banned Books |work=State Impact |url=https://stateimpact.npr.org/florida/2013/11/19/author-sherman-alexie-talks-young-adult-fiction-and-banned-books/}}</ref>

[[Lauren Groff]] says that "I love Stephen King and I owe him more than I could ever express... I love his wild imagination and his vivid scenes, many of which populate my nightmares even decades after I last read the books they're in. But the greatest thing I gleaned most from reading Stephen King is his big-hearted glee, the way he treats writing with gratitude, the way he sees his job not as the source of anguish and pain many writers self-pityingly see it as, but rather as something he's over-the-moon delighted to be lucky enough to do. If I could steal one thing from King, and keep it close to my heart forever, it is his sense of almost-holy glee when it comes to writing."<ref>{{Cite web |last=Timberg |first=Scott |date=September 11, 2015 |title=Stephen King goes to the White House: With his National Medal of Arts, the master of horror plants both feet firmly in the literary canon |url=https://www.salon.com/2015/09/11/stephen_king_goes_to_the_white_house_with_his_national_medal_of_arts_the_master_of_horror_plants_both_feet_firmly_in_the_literary_canon/}}</ref>

The hero of [[Junot Díaz]]'s ''[[The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao]]'' dreams of being "the Dominican Stephen King", and Díaz alludes to King's work several times throughout the novel.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Díaz |first=Junot |title=[[The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao]] |year=2007 |pages=12, 18, 27}}</ref> [[Colson Whitehead]] recalls that "The first big book I read was ''[[Night Shift (short story collection)|Night Shift]]'' by Stephen King, you know, a huge book of short stories. And so for many years I just wanted to write horror fiction."<ref>{{Cite web |last=Freeman |first=John |date=November 23, 2016 |title=Write the Book That Scares You: An Interview with Colson Whitehead |url=https://lithub.com/12-literary-writers-on-stephen-kings-influence/}}</ref> In a talk at [[Virginia Commonwealth University]], Whitehead recalls that in college "I wanted to write the black ''[[The Shining (novel)|Shining]]'' or the black ''[['Salem's Lot|Salem's Lot]]''... Take any Stephen King title and put 'the black' in front of it. That's basically what I wanted to do."<ref>{{Cite news |last=Gresham |first=Tom |date=February 10, 2017 |title=Colson Whitehead tells the story behind the 'Underground Railroad' - VCU New - Virginia Commonwealth University |work=VCU News |url=https://news.vcu.edu/article/Author_tells_the_story_behind_his_awardwinning_Underground_Railroad}}</ref>