"Edgar Allan Poe exerts a noticeable influence over King's writing as well. In The Shining, the phrase 'And the red death held sway over all' hearkens back to Poe's 'And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all' from 'The Masque of the Red Death.' The short story 'Dolan's Cadillac' has a theme almost identical to Poe's 'The Cask of Amontillado,' including a paraphrase of Fortunato's famous plea, 'For the love of God, Montresor!' In The Shining, King refers to Poe as 'The Great American Hack.'"
--- wiki"Stephen King’s writing is securely rooted in the great American tradition that glorifies spirit-of-place and the abiding power of narrative. He crafts stylish, mind-bending page-turners that contain profound moral truths – some beautiful, some harrowing – about our inner lives. This Award commemorates Mr. King’s well-earned place of distinction in the wide world of readers and book lovers of all ages."
--- National Book Foundation"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 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 publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller. By awarding it to King they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat. If this is going to be the criterion in the future, then perhaps next year the committee should give its award for distinguished contribution to Danielle Steel, and surely the Nobel Prize for literature should go to J.K. Rowling."
--- Harold Bloom, literary critic"Others in the writing community expressed their contempt of the slight towards King. When Richard Snyder, the former CEO of Simon & Schuster, described King's work as 'non-literature,' Orson Scott Card responded: 'Let me assure you that King's work most definitely is literature, because it was written to be published and is read with admiration. What Snyder really means is that it is not the literature preferred by the academic-literary elite.'"
--- wiki"A lot of people were outraged that he [King] was honored at the National Book Awards, as if a popular writer could not be taken seriously. But after finding that his book On Writing had more useful and observant things to say about the craft than any book since Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, I have gotten over my own snobbery."
--- Roger Ebert, film critic
Stephen King's Official Web Page
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