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A best-selling author with over sixty book-length works to date, Stephen King has now joined the ranks of Agatha Christie and Mickey Spillane as a Mystery Writers of America "Grandmaster." J. Madison Davis explains why the addition of "serious writer" to King's résumé is long overdue.
Stephen King is certainly one of the most wellknown living writers, but this doesn't mean that he has always been respected. In 1992 Esther Fein wrote in the New York Times, "King of Horror Stephen King doesn't .ave a lot of literary pretenses. He knows, for example, t he will probably never be sitting on a stage, waiting to hear himself named the winner of a National Book d."' Nevertheless, eleven years later, he was on very stage waiting to be awarded recognition for "Distinguished Contribution to American Letters," joining the list of such previous winners as Studs Terkel, Eudora Welty, Philip Roth, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Recently, the Mystery Writers of America voted King a "Grandmaster" to be honored at the MWA banquet held in the last week of April 2007. To be elevated to Grandmaster is the most distinguished award given to a writer by the MWA and in the past has gone to such luminaries as Stuart Kaminsky, Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, and Mary Higgins Clark.
Neither award came without controversy. As King admitted in his National Book Award 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. . . . I salute the National Book Foundation Board, who took a huge risk in giving this award to a man many people see as a rich hack."! King has often been regarded in this way, as one of those few incredibly popular authors who is somehow milking the Zeitgeist to supply the lowest common denominator of readers. Occasionally, someone generous would compare him to Charles Dickens, whose common denominations far exceeded his initial critical success. At the very feast, King is somehow the "Soul of an Age," as Jonson said of Shakespeare, capturing the nightmares and obsessions of our time, though many doubted he was "for all time."
I once heard King asked if he (like...