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Stephen King's legacy may well be measured more in nightmares than Pulitzers, but his contributions to the American literary landscape cannot be denied or dismissed. It is almost impossible to find a person who hasn't had the pleasure of being terrified by one or more of Stephen King's many books or movies.
King who once called himself "the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries," has sold nearly as many books as McDonalds has sold burgers. In the 1980s, he penned no less than seven of the top-25 best-selling novels of the decade.
Among the unforgettable works penned by King during the 1980s, were Cujo, Firestarter, Pet Semetary, The Mist, The Talisman, and It. In the same decade he produced two far more subtle works, Misery and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. Those two went on to become two of his most successful movie projects.
The undisputed king of the horror genre, King has a remarkable knack for identifying our deepest psychological fears and then gleefully exploiting them. He can take our best friends, our cats and dogs, and turn them into evil incarnate. He can take the family car and turn it into a weapon of vengeance. He can even turn a senior prom into a bloodbath of biblical proportions.
"People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff," King once explained. "I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk."
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