....
King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. His father abandoned his family when King was very young, and his mother moved around the country before settling back in Maine—this time in the small inland town of Durham. King’s first published story, “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber,” appeared in 1965 in a fan magazine called Comics Review. Around that time he received a scholarship to attend the University of Maine in Orono, where he met his wife, Tabitha, a novelist with whom he has three children and to whom he is still married. For several years he struggled to support his young family by washing motel linens at a laundry, teaching high-school English, and occasionally selling short stories to men’s magazines. Then, in 1973, he sold his novel Carrie, which quickly became a best seller. Since then, King has sold over three hundred million books.
..... Although he was dismissed by critics for much of his career—one New York Times review called King “a writer of fairly engaging and preposterous claptrap”—his writing has received greater recognition in recent years, and in 2003 he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. King has also been honored for his devoted efforts to support and promote the work of other authors. In 1997 he received the Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers magazine, and he was recently selected to edit the 2007 edition of Best American Short Stories.
.....
INTERVIEWER:
.....
Would you say then that this fear is the main subject of your fiction?
...
KING
.....
I’d say that what I do is like a crack in the mirror. If you go back over the books from Carrie on up, what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class American life as it’s lived at the time that particular book was written. In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that’s inexplicable to you, whether it’s the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we’re still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts.....
INTERVIEWER:
....
Bad things happen to children in Pet Sematary [1983]. Where did that come from?
KING:
That book was pretty personal. Everything in it—up to the point where the little boy is killed in the road—everything is true. We moved into that house by the road. It was Orrington instead of Ludlow, but the big trucks did go by, and the old guy across the street did say, You just want to watch ’em around the road. We did go out in the field. We flew kites. We did go up and look at the pet cemetery. I did find my daughter’s cat, Smucky, dead in the road, run over. We buried him up in the pet cemetery, and I did hear Naomi out in the garage the night after we buried him. I heard all these popping noises—she was jumping up and down on packing material. She was crying and saying, Give me my cat back! Let God have his own cat! I just dumped that right into the book. .....
......
INTERVIEWER
......
When you accepted the National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, you gave a speech defending popular fiction, and you listed a number of authors who you felt were underappreciated by the literary establishment. ....
KING
.... This is a critical time for American letters because it’s under attack from so many other media: TV, movies, the Internet, and all the different ways we have of getting nonprint input to feed the imagination. Books, that old way of transmitting stories, are under attack. .....
...[O]ne other thing. When you shut the door to serious popular fiction, you shut another door on people who are considered serious novelists.
.........
INTERVIEWER
You’re something of a book collector. The book dealer Glenn Horowitz once told me that he sent you something by mistake and that, when he apologized, you said you’d buy it anyway.
.....
KING
I think that’s true. I’m not a huge collector. I’ve probably got a dozen signed Faulkners and a lot of Theodore Dreiser. I’ve got Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers. I love her. At home I’ve got one of those old-fashioned paperback racks they had in drugstores. And I have a lot of fifties paperbacks because I love the covers, and I’ve collected a certain amount of pornography from the sixties, paperback pornography that was done by people like Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block, just because it amuses me. You see little flashes of their style.
INTERVIEWER
What did you learn from writers like Faulkner, Dreiser, and McCullers?
KING
The voices. I’m reading All the King’s Men again now, but I’m also listening to it on CD. And the guy who does it is a good reader. Willie Stark goes, “There is always something. . . . from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” You hear it and you say to yourself, Oh man, that’s the voice! It just clicks in your head.
.......
[In reference to editing the anthology,] I’m reading all the fantasy and science-fiction journals, especially Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, to see what’s there. Alfred Hitchcock used to be a literary-quality magazine, but it’s been subsumed by the same company that owns Ellery Queen, and the quality of stories has gone downhill. Editing Best American is a good project, but it’s scary because there’s so much out there. What haunts me is, what are we missing?
We still have not fathomed the zeitghost.
No comments:
Post a Comment