2003 The clash between low- and highbrow is one of the never-ending, and more entertaining, literary wars. One side, typically, has the money; the other side the prestige.
Few authors have had more money than Stephen King. In 2003 the author of Carrie, The Shining, and It made #14 on the Forbes wealthiest celebrity list, with an estimated income of $50 million-plus. Only novelist Michael Crichton ranked higher among writers. And Crichton was, by contrast with King, a child of privilege. He had written best-selling novels while a Dean’s List medical student at Harvard.
Stevie King had had no such advantages and always believed that he was denied the respect he deserved. Unlike Crichton, he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, from mobile home to mansion.
It rankled. Even in the years of his triumph. On 15 September 2003 the National Book Foundation announced that King would be the recipient of ‘lifetime award’. In his acceptance speech at the public ceremony on 19 November that year, King recalled how he and his wife Tabitha lived in a trailer …
… and she made a writing space for me in the tiny laundry room with a desk and her Olivetti portable between the washer and dryer … When I gave up on Carrie, it was Tabby who rescued the first few pages of single-spaced manuscript from the wastebasket, told me it was good, said I ought to go on.
The main thrust of his November speech was Carrie-style payback. They hadn’t emptied a bucket of pig’s blood over his head, but the literary establishment was guilty of ‘tokenism’ – treating him like a house negro with their lifetime award. It was an awkward occasion.
Nonetheless, the literary establishment declined to be cowed by some hack who had struck it rich with a reading public even less cultivated than himself. Harold Bloom, who is to literary criticism what Einstein was to physics, declared that the NBA’s decision to give an award to King was:
… another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I’ve described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.
The war goes on.