Everyday People in the Books of Stephen King. A Librarian at the Kitchen Table. No. 404.

Last night I read Walter Mosely's introduction to Stephen King when King won the
DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN LETTERS AWARD.

Walter Mosley's introduction is powerful and humane reading. He says of King's writing:

Not a story about great generals or superhuman secret agents armed to the teeth with the finest weaponry and training. Not the selective history lessons taught in substandard schools but a story about losing a wife, a child or a friend, about an unemployed carpenter or an alcoholic housewife or a small boy, hectored by bullies until he is ready to commit murder or suicide. A story about looking in the mirror and seeing something that no one else sees. It's a story about everyday people finding heroes in their own hearts or maybe next door.

Mr. King's novels are inhabited by people with everyday jobs and average bodies, people who have to try to find extraordinary strength when they've never been anything but ordinary. Stephen King once said that daily life is the frame that makes the picture. His commitment, as I see it, is to celebrate and empower the everyday man and woman as they buy aspirin and cope with cancer. He takes our daily lives and makes them into something heroic. He takes our world, validates our distrust of it and then helps us to see that there's a chance to transcend the muck. He tells us that even if we fail in our struggles, we are still worthy enough to pass on our energies in the survival of humanity.

Mr. King's phenomenal popularity is due to his almost instinctual understanding of the fears that form the psyche of America's working class. He knows fear. And not the fear of demonic forces alone but also of loneliness and poverty, of hunger and the unknown we have to breach in order to survive.

Read Walter Mosely's introduction to Stephen King at the NBA honor.