Dreams Deferred: Ambition and the MassMarket in Melville and King

D AV I D D O W L I N G

Artists’ fame is the most monstrous of all, for it implies the idea ofimmortality. And that is a diabolical snare, because the grotesquelymegalomaniac ambition to survive one’s death is inseparably boundto the artist’s probity . . . [But] to write without that ambition iscynicism: a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books thatare ephemeral, commonplace, conventional—thus not useful, thusburdensome, thus noxious—is contemptible. This is the novelist’scurse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania.

(Milan Kundera ‘‘What is a Novelist?’’)1

IN THE EARLY 1850S, HERMAN MELVILLE’S ‘‘CAREER LONG CONFLICT WITH

his readers’’ dramatically escalated, according to William Charvat(204). Likewise, Stephen King would issue his harshest attack on

his readers yet in the early 1980s, surfacing a conflict he has seldomvoiced in his career that arose out of his aspirations to serious literaryfiction, if not the creation of The Great American Novel itself. WhileMelville was trying to disassociate himself from his early successfulnovel, Typee, as ‘‘the man who lived among the cannibals’’ in the early1850s with Moby-Dick and Pierre, King harbored a strong desire toelevate himself above his popular readership beginning in the early1980s, a goal he found profoundly difficult to achieve given the sheerforce of his audience’s demand. This struggle to liberate himself fromthe clutches of his Constant Reader, ironically enough, is the focal

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 44, No. 5, 2011r 2011, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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point of the wildly popular 1987 horror novel, Misery. Similarly, Mel-ville’s animosity toward a market blind to his serious fiction drives theoddest and angriest novel of his career, Pierre, or The Ambiguities, writ-ten during the nadir of Moby-Dick’s critical and commercial failure.Compounding Moby-Dick’s failure was the sheer effort that went intoit: Andrew Delbanco calls it ‘‘the most ambitious book ever conceivedby an American writer’’ (124).

My purpose is to examine ambition and the torture chamber itplaced two of our most notable high and low culture writers in—asituation that has attracted huge interest in Melville’s career. The issueof ‘‘greatness’’ has been a concern among critics in terms of canonicityand canon formation (see the 1994 edition of American Literature ded-icated to ‘‘New Melville’’ and Lauter’s ‘‘Melville Climbs the Canon’’specifically) as much as it was for Melville himself when, as EdgarDryden notes, ‘‘in midcareer he is led to examine the problems of awriter attempting to work out the ways in which he can speak to andfor his culture, as well as to articulate his own sense of the relation ofthe literary vocation to the local, that is to say to history, politics, andthe products of popular culture’’ (7). Few have dignified King byapplying the same questions to him,2 let alone along side a ‘‘colossus’’like Melville, as Giles Gunn calls him (3). But such a desire to speakfor one’s culture for all time, to transcend the ephemeral and thepopular, is just as emphatic in King’s writing—both fiction and non-fictional—at a juncture just as crisis ridden and demanding of self-(re)assessment as it is in Melville’s. Certainly many writers have writtenabout writing; what we learn by placing these two together is thattheir worst professional nightmares would be fictionalized in phan-tasmagoric, sensationalized visions that functioned to both confesstheir canonical dreams and rage at themselves and their mass audiencesfor threatening the realization of those dreams. These two toweringfigures are known for opposite reasons, King for his commercial successand Melville for his enduring canonical status, yet they share in Miseryand Pierre an occupational anxiety at two analogous junctures in theircareers, a sudden sense that their literary legacies were being cementedbefore their eyes by economic forces, especially a consumerist ethos thatwas swallowing up their readership, largely beyond their control.

Misery was published during a decade defined by its materialism,3

and widely associated with the film Wall Street, which informedviewers that ‘‘Greed is good’’; Pierre emerged during the decade that

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Melville would pen his own ‘‘story of Wall Street.’’ Such times boreprofound developments in the mass market hostile to popular authors(Melville was known for Typee’s success) with canonical aspirations (Mel-ville achieved such status thirty years after his death): a sharp rise in massreadership transformed authorship into a commercial enterprise in Mel-ville’s antebellum America,4 and made genre fiction writers richer thanever during the corporate power surge of King’s postmodern 1980s.5

When placed next to each other, Pierre and Misery, the writers’ most self-reflexive novels—in which they hold their careers up to the closest self-scrutiny of all their fiction—illuminate how their most acute momentsof professional crisis arose from the collision of canonical dreams and therealities of consumerist literary markets, the ‘‘diabolical snare’’ of strivingfor immortality, when the ‘‘ephemeral, commonplace, conventional’’ isdemanded (Kundera 42). Such a link prevents them from appearing‘‘reared beyond the commonality of civilization; as if there was no rec-ognizable thread’’ that could bind them, as Cynthia Ozick laments thecurrent fear in criticism of crossing historical thresholds: ‘‘the key isindebtedness, the key is connectedness’’ (74).

The fictional origin of that thread is located precisely where Mel-ville’s bitterness takes over mid-way through Pierre as he goes on theoffensive against those who played a hand in the failure of Moby-Dick—publishers, reviewers, and readers. He and King alike mock the literarymarketplace as much as their own complicit roles in it. In his newbiography, Andrew Delbanco’s comments on Melville’s self-mockery inPierre can equally apply to King’s frustration at creating such an ob-tuse, vile readership as that represented by Annie, his allegorical Con-stant Reader of Misery. King loathes himself for wallowing in the filthof low culture—if he created Annie and Annie likes Liberace andfigurines, then he is (at his worst) a producer of kitsch, or so he isconfessing, on par with garage sale velvet portraits of dogs playingpoker. On the other hand, in Melville ‘‘we have a parody of the Ro-mantic author imagining himself as high priest charged by god tobring forth Truth,’’ as Delbanco says, whose embrace of the hermitartist role only rendered ‘‘a blocked and stupendously pretentiouswriter . . . indifferent to a world that generously returned the indiffer-ence’’ (196). Both men mock themselves in Pierre and Misery for theirfailures to achieve high culture’s crown of literary status—one foraiming too high and alienating common readers as Melville does withMoby-Dick and the other for aiming too low and courting a crowd

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below himself and humanity in general. Annie is depicted as sub-human, a kind of murderous pig; contrast this with Melville’s villainsin Pierre who, while they bear the marks of genteel, privileged snob-bery, are at least not painted as beasts or monsters.

Robert Milder’s new and important addition to Melville scholarship,Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine, also acknowledges suchself-mockery, but lays emphasis on the Freudian implications ratherthan the professional and biographical situation: ‘‘Melville turnedagainst himself early in Pierre through the mocking self-reference of theGlendinning/Gansevoort parallels and the giddy delight his narratortakes in promising to topple Pierre from his ‘noble pedestal’ and striphim of all inward and outward complacencies’’ (130). Such evidence cansituate Melville as a ‘‘Freudian melancholic,’’ but the ‘‘complacencies’’he attacks in Pierre also speak volumes to Melville’s own sense ofinadequacy at formulating a notion of authorship that might enablehim to write Gospels without dollars damning him. His well knowncomplaint to Hawthorne is relevant here: ‘‘What I feel most moved towrite, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the otherway I cannot. So the product is a final hash and all my books arebotches’’ (Letters 191).

Like King’s Annie, Melville’s villains in Pierre arise out of his senseof being prevented by an unjust system of producing his very bestwork. Pierre’s ‘‘burning desire to deliver what he thought to be new, orat least miserably neglected Truth to the world; and the prospectivemenace of being absolutely penniless, unless by the sale of his book hecould realize the money’’ are also Melville’s (133). Emory Elliot hasrecently rejected a critical tradition of collapsing Melville and Pierreinto one, by claiming that Melville’s humor at Pierre’s expense dis-tances author from character, and that Pierre never resorts to spiritualor philosophical thought to rescue himself from despair (194). Despitedifferences, the chief anxiety plaguing both was the prospect of writing‘‘the Gospels of this century’’ only to ‘‘die in the gutter’’ (Letters 129).This is the dark, skeptical underside of Pierre’s sunny resolve ‘‘to givethe world a book, which the world should hail with surprise anddelight’’ (Pierre 333). Melville eerily foreshadows in the pages of thenovel itself the rejection of Pierre he would receive from his Londonpublisher, Bentley. Pierre’s letter, like Bentley’s, voices skepticism inthe author’s capacity to produce a book for mass consumption ‘‘Uponthe pretense of writing a popular novel’’ (Pierre 420).

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Pierre’s premature attempt ‘‘to write a mature book’’ is precisely themistake Melville’s British publisher Richard Bentley suspected whenMelville offered him the proofs of the new novel. Bentley distrustedthat Pierre would perform any better than Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacketand Moby-Dick for good reason: these novels had brought the publisher aloss of 453 pounds. Bentley could therefore not afford to pay a lumpsum for the copyright, and offered Melville the less than desirable dealof publishing his ‘‘new work [Pierre]’’ on a joint account with Melville,with payments of half profits as they arose. Even under such a dealBentley could not hope to reduce his losses by more than one hundredpounds. Bentley’s offer, sent on March 4, 1852, insulted and offendedMelville not only because of its stinginess, but because his publisher hadclearly lost faith in him as an author: ‘‘I fear,’’ Melville’s publisher toldhim, ‘‘your books . . . are produced in too rapid succession’’ (Letters 149).

In April, Melville wrote back his London publisher to renegotiate theterms. In so doing, he made the appeal to his publisher that Pierre was anentirely new work, like nothing he had done before ‘‘treating . . . utterlynew scenes & characters; . . . and very much more calculated for pop-ularity than anything you have yet published of mine’’ (Letters 150). Likethe character Pierre, who begins his book with the idea of reinventinghimself both personally and professionally, Melville tells his publisherthat the author of poor selling books can be forgotten: ‘‘let bygones bebygones; let those previous books, for the present, take care of them-selves. For here now we have a new book, and what shall we say aboutthis?’’ (Letters 150). With all the hopefulness and naivete of Pierre, heattempts to deny and flee his past of public humiliation and rejection byasking, ‘‘If nothing has been made on the old book, may not somethingbe made on the new?’’ Melville even goes so far in this appeal to suggestthat Pierre appear under a pseudonym, ‘‘‘By a Vermonter’ say, or ‘By GuyWinthrop.’’’ Such a new work warranted a new authorial persona, Melvillereasoned, to disaffiliate Pierre from his now tarnished reputation. Pierre’sown escape into the anonymity of New York City is the fictional ex-pression of this professional urge.

Bentley’s reply terminated negotiations with Melville, citing thatnot only would publication under his imprint require the original half-profits deal he offered, but that the novel would be subject tosubstantial revisions without Melville’s consent, a policy of ‘‘silent-editing’’ which is humbling to any writer to say the least. Mardi andMoby-Dick would have been more suitable for mass consumption,

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Bentley told his author, ‘‘If you had . . . restrained your imaginationsomewhat and had written in a style to be understood by the great massof readers—nay if you had not sometimes offended the feelings of manysensitive readers you would have succeeded in England’’ (Letters 151).In Pierre, Melville lampoons such motives in the publishing firm of‘‘Steel, Flint and Asbestos,’’ referencing the stuff of cold manufacturingand construction materials for mass production. The fire imagery in thefirm’s name—steel and flint make sparks for fire and asbestos does notburn—implies that their business is logically and intuitively oxymo-ronic, wholly antithetical to the heat and flame of serious literature.But Pierre was as much an attack on the mass book market as anattempt to capitalize on it; Melville knew domestic romances wereselling in huge numbers at the time, and wanted to boost his decliningincome.6 Unlike Melville, King voices his criticism of the mass mar-ket, particularly his readers, from within the safety of the horror genrein which he had already achieved success.

Pierre initially has no sense of the professional demands of author-ship in the marketplace. He begins as an amateur, arrogantly assumingwriting to be easy work, ‘‘and that it is not altogether impossible toreceive a few pence in exchange for his ditties’’ (Pierre 305). Pierrenaively looks on writing for money as a way of retaining his privilegedpast and avoiding a working class occupation like that of ‘‘The me-chanic, the day-laborer, [who] had but one way to live; his body mustprovide for his body.’’ He instead gleefully embraces the idea of ‘‘let-ting his body stay lazily at home, send off his soul to labor, and his soulwould come faithfully back and pay his body her wages’’ (Pierre 307).Pierre’s hubris is class bound. He naively believes his genteel back-ground will exempt him from the work of ‘‘many a poor be-inkedgalley-slave, toiling with the heavy oar of the quill, to gain somethingwherewithal to stave off the cravings of nature; and in his hours ofmorbid self-reproach, regarding his paltry wages, at all events, as anunavoidable disgrace to him; while this galley-slave of letters wouldhave leaped at delight—reckless of the feeble seams of his pantaloons—at the prospect of inheriting the broad farms of Saddle Meadows’’(Pierre 307). Pierre’s arrogance is closely associated with Melville’s ownself-awareness that in writing Pierre he finds himself in the middle of aproject (writing for the masses) he has terribly underestimated, perhapsdue to the privilege and consequent complacency following his rel-atively easy success with Typee. This combined with a new disrespect for

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popular fiction grown from his recent alliance with Hawthorne and theruin of Moby-Dick, his high art magnum opus (dedicated to Hawthornehimself who famously denounced domestic novelists as ‘‘that damnedscribbling mob of women’’).

Melville’s realization that Pierre was bound to fail springs from hisown idealization of his craft as romantically insulated from the realityof material necessity within the economic networks of production inthe marketplace. Melville gives full voice to this naıve, immature, andimpractical sense of literary business through his protagonist author.Far from sending off his soul to toil while resting his body at home,writing becomes nothing short of self-induced slave labor to Pierre.His writing chamber is a dismal, cramped, prison-like place. It ishardly a parlor for lounging and soul searching, but is a ‘‘most mis-erable room’’ with ‘‘a plank, paper, pens, and infernally black ink, fourleprously dingy white walls, no carpet, a cup of water, and a dry biscuitor two.’’ The dismal scene makes Pierre regard the work of writing indisgust and reproach as ‘‘the most miserable of all the pursuits of aman, and say if here be the place, and his be the trade that Godintended him for’’ (Pierre 355). Significantly, his anger springs from theeconomic pallor of ‘‘the trade that God intended him for’’ which caststhe writer as a prisoner within ‘‘four . . . white walls’’ with his cus-tomary ration of bread and water (‘‘a cup of water, and a dry biscuit ortwo.’’) King will also offer a writer’s captivity narrative of sorts, onlywith his antagonist, Constant Reader Annie Wilkes, lodging in thenext room and making frequent preposterous demands on his manu-script in progress, which she has made him write in the first place.Both characters, like both authors, significantly, are the architects oftheir own authorial prisons.

Such confinement takes the shape of unsympathetic and neglectfulreaders blind to (what the authors perceive as) their lofty literarymethods. Melville thought of the reading public as ill-prepared to beweaned from its magazine and newspaper reading of cause-effect prose,a kind of writing that is the extreme opposite of the impressionist,patch-work narrative Melville was writing. Paul Lyons’s study of Mel-ville’s sense of stylistic influence shows that Pierre’s egregiously self-reliant method reflects not a seasoned, balanced array of technique andallusion, but rather a quirky, limited set of works that struck his fancy(5). This method only alienated him all the more from his readers.King depicts his allegorical Constant Reader as the antagonist to his

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writer figure of Misery for similar reasons: she thinks the fiction shereads is real, cares nothing about the mechanism of its production, itsindices and concordances, and regards the literature as only an object ofher own consumption; King’s protagonist writer, Paul, will even crit-icize himself for straining too hard to escape Annie by winning an-other, better audience than her. He literally screams for academicpraise, begging critics (us!) to notice: ‘‘Hey, guys! This stuff has got asliding perspective! This stuff has got stream of consciousness interludes! This ismy REAL WORK you assholes!’’ (Misery 287).

King’s critical neglect in 1987 was far worse that it is now, espe-cially with the emergence of Heidi Strengell’s scholarly work on hisintersection with postmodernism, Dissecting Stephen King: From theGothic to Literary Naturalism. So did he really have as much to complainabout as Melville, for example, who suffered such a horrendous criticalreception of Pierre? ‘‘The book is one of the absurdest and most ri-diculous things that ever ink and paper were wasted on’’ one reviewerproclaimed of Pierre (Hazewell 421). Another review conveyed thegravity of a physician delivering a bleak diagnosis: ‘‘it appeared to becomposed by the ravings and reveries of a madman,’’ suggesting ‘‘Mel-ville was really supposed to be deranged, and that his friends weretaking measures to place him under treatment.’’ The prescription? ‘‘Wehope one of the earliest precautions will be to keep him stringentlysecluded from pen and ink’’ (Courant 420). King was hurt more bycritical neglect than such fever-pitched abuse, as Misery marked thepoint in King’s career when he most achingly felt that, as Strengellpoints out, ‘‘more was required to satisfy his ambition than the sale ofbooks’’ (263). Through Paul, King confesses ‘‘that the increasing dis-missal of his work in the critical press as that of a ‘popular writer’(which was, as he understood it, one step—a small one—above that of a‘hack’) had hurt him badly’’ (286).

Escaping the prison of an adoring and suffocating audience has takennonfictional forms in King. For example, the preface of Stationary Bike,King’s recent allegory of his struggle to be taken seriously by theacademic community, directly taunts and challenges English professorsto decode the novel’s profound symbolism. The posturing makes clear,at least to King, that he has really tied the keepers of the canon inknots with this one. The gesture interestingly echoes Melville’s dare inMoby-Dick—regarding the brow of the whale and the novel itself byimplication—to ‘‘read it if you can’’ (335). King’s more recent claim to

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literary distinction comes through an advertisement for Lisey’s Story.The placement of the ad in the New Yorker and its glowing, enlargedpraise from Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon indicate that King hastried to infiltrate the establishment in more subtle ways than the lockerroom bravado of essentially calling out all English professors to a semioticbrawl behind the woodshed as he does in the preface of Stationary Bike.For Chabon was heralded, after his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,as nothing less than the next Fitzgerald according to the New York TimesBook Review, a publication that ranks among the most authoritative ar-biters of culture and literature in existence. Not coincidentally, The NewYorker was also where Fitzgerald would get his start as a writer, pub-lishing short and early versions of what would later become almost uni-versally defined as world-class literature of the highest order, with anassortment of readers laying claim to The Great Gatsby as the greatAmerican novel. The New Yorker advertisement overtly places King in thesame company as Chabon and, by indirection, Fitzgerald, representinganother of King’s expressions of his desire to be canonized. King has beenopen about his desire for all the tokens of canonization:

I’d like to win the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, theNobel Prize. I’d like to have someone write a New York Times BookReview piece that says, ‘‘Hey, wait a minute guys, we made a mis-take—this guy is one of the great writers of the twentieth century.’’But it’s not going to happen.

(Goldstein 8)

In 2003, when he did receive the ‘‘Distinguished Contribution toAmerican Letters Award’’ from The National Book Foundation, theorganization that adjudicates the National Book Award, King dis-cussed the relationship of his work to other culturally sanctioned formsof literature. Without naming him, his acceptance speech began with abarb against Harold Bloom who spearheaded an outcry against theselection of King for the award. His speech goes on to dismantlehis image as a ‘‘rich hack’’ perpetrated by the Bloom camp (King‘‘Acceptance’’). In an attempt to align himself with literary royalty byquoting Frank Norris on authenticity in fiction, he asserts that he‘‘never wrote for money’’ but ‘‘to tell the truth about the way peoplewould behave in a similar situation’’ to his fictional scenarios (King‘‘Acceptance’’). His spite is more convincing than his defense of hisprimary authorial role as truth speaker, as he assails pinning the profit

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motive on ‘‘anyone who writes genre fiction or any kind of fiction,’’which he finds ‘‘still hurtful, it’s infuriating and it’s demeaning’’ (King‘‘Acceptance’’). Even in receiving the award, King was wise enough toknow that it did not seal his place in the canon, alluding to his fear ofthe ‘‘tokenism’’ his win might serve to shut out other popular writersfrom the award for years to come, which in at least the four years since,it clearly has (‘‘Acceptance’’). Thus it seemed highly unlikely that hiswin might bridge the gap, King suggested with strained diplomacy,between ‘‘the so-called popular writers of this country and the so-calledliterary writers [who] have stared at each other with animosity and awillful lack of understanding’’ (King ‘‘Acceptance’’).

King openly acknowledged his jealousy of the literary establishmentin the speech, admitting being ‘‘bitterly angry at writers who wereconsidered ‘literary’’’ (‘‘Acceptance’’). Perhaps in an effort to placate theliterary authors and critics who largely comprised the very audiencebefore him, he confessed defeat due to lack of skill, ‘‘I knew I didn’tquite have enough talent or polish to be one of them so there was anelement of jealousy,’’ mocking his own anger toward ‘‘these writers[who] always seemed to have the inside track in my view at the time’’as sounding like the crackpot conspiracy theories of his ‘‘least favoriteuncle who thought there was an international Jewish cabal runningeverything form the Ford Motor Company to the Federal Reserve’’(King ‘‘Acceptance’’). This is clearly not the man who wrote the hostilepreface to Stationary Bike. Almost happy to be outside of the canon, heassociates Tabitha, who encouraged him to continue in the vein of hisinitial popular works, with his dedication to his early unpolished genrefiction fueled by modest talent. Indeed, Tabbie takes on an Annie-likerole, goading him on to write what sells, to ‘‘shut up and eat youreggs,’’ in the spirit of Ruth Younger (to whom King alludes in Misery)‘‘to stop with the breast beating. She said to save my self-pity and turnmy energy to the typewriter’’ not presumably to write the greatAmerican novel, but, as Ruth admonishes Walter in Lorraine Hans-berry’s A Raisin in the Sun, to work the modest resources he has withoutindulging in grandiose, unattainable visions of professional potential(‘‘Acceptance’’). King’s characterization of Tabbie in the speech is con-sonant with this sentiment, as she is the gritty realist—‘‘sarcastic’’ andtough—to his romantic dreamer.

If Tabbie was right, that efforts to write literary fiction would be invain, her advice also saved him from wasting such work on his least

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sophisticated fans, as Misery so aptly illustrates. Melville also shows hisfrustration with what he thought was the unsophisticated nature of hisreaders when he describes with scathing sarcasm the popular receptionof his protagonist’s first publication by ‘‘the . . . applauses of the alwaysintelligent, and extremely discriminating public’’ (Pierre 288). AtPierre’s writing desk, we can see that Melville was airing these frus-trations about authorship, casting himself as the victim of a sensa-tionalized gothic torture scene. Like a prisoner serving a life sentence,Pierre the writer becomes a living corpse ‘‘With cheek rather pale . . .and lips rather blue.’’ The idealization of literary culture and the workof writing as an activity of the ‘‘civilized’’ and enlightened sensibilitiescollapses when Melville sets it within its economic context as a trade toshow how barbaric it is: ‘‘If physical, practical unreason make thesavage, which is he? Civilization, Philosophy, Ideal Virtue! Beholdyour victim!’’ (Pierre 355). Indeed, the growth of the intellect ismatched by the deterioration of the body and the loss of the soul. Wesee this image in King as well; the protagonist of Misery is a popularauthor whose physical condition deteriorates so drastically that he losesa digit on his hand (a punishment courtesy of Annie) as well keys onhis typewriter (thanks to dilapidated equipment supplied by the con-sumer-oriented Constant Reader, Annie, blind to the material condi-tions necessary for today’s professional author).

As Pierre develops his authorial skills, he enervates economically andtherefore physically, depriving himself of money for bread: ‘‘the wiserand profounder he should grow, the more and more he lessened thechances for bread’’ (Pierre 359). He never specifies which kind of ro-mantic mode in particular (psychological? sentimental? domestic? ad-venture?) would be the path to success: ‘‘that could he now hurl his bookout the window, and fall to on some shallow nothing of a novel, co-mposable in a month at the longest, then could he reasonably hope forboth appreciation and cash. But the devouring profundities, now openedup in him, consume all his vigor’’ (Pierre 359). Pierre’s commitment tothe ‘‘ambiguities’’ within him now prevent him from writing ‘‘enter-tainingly and profitably shallow in some pellucid romance’’ (Pierre 359).Interestingly, it is precisely this popular yarn-spinning style that King’sPaul uses to survive and escape Annie—thus satisfying the demand forpopular fiction—which Pierre (and Melville alike) refuse to resort to.

Genre fiction readers tend not to tolerate ‘‘ambiguities’’ associatedwith a higher authorial calling. King complains through Paul that ‘‘the

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work, the pride in your work, the worth of the work itself . . . all thosethings faded away to the magic lantern shades they really were whenthe pain got bad enough’’ (Misery 29). He directly blames his popularreaders, embodied by Annie, for taking away that sense of craft whichtranscends genre fiction, but is more angry with himself for allowingher to, like a bad addiction: ‘‘That she would do that to him—that shecould, when he had spent most of his adult life thinking the word writerwas the most important definition of himself—made her seem utterlymonstrous,’’ as King ironically plays out his woe in precisely the ge-neric melody of gothic horror, ‘‘something he must escape’’ (29). Herpower promises wealth and death, and as such, ‘‘She really was an idol.If she didn’t kill him, she might kill what was in him,’’ namely hisproud aspirations for literary fiction (Misery 29).

Like King, Melville strained against the restrictions of genre labels.Genre’s tyranny over literary reputation and the celebrity system thathelped produce famous writers emerge in his June 1851 letter to Na-thaniel Hawthorne. Melville complained that ‘‘All Fame is patronage.Let me be infamous: there is no patronage in that. What ‘reputation’H.M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity is badenough, any way; but to go down as a ‘man who lived among thecannibals’!’’ (Branch 249). Like King’s inability to shake the horrorfiction label, Melville bitterly resists the public’s insistence on group-ing him in the travel genre of literature, an association that began withhis first novel in 1846, Typee, or a Peep at Polynesian Life. He wantedinstead to be associated with weightier moral and psychological con-cerns. Being pinned permanently into the critical category of Typeemeant for Melville that he would suffer a one-dimensional, even in-fantile reputation profoundly undeserving of his hard and serious work:‘‘When I speak of posterity in reference to myself, I only mean thebabies who will probably be born the moment immediately ensuingupon my giving up the ghost. I shall go down to some of them, in alllikelihood. Typee will be given to them, perhaps, with their ginger-bread. I have come to regard this matter of Fame as the most trans-parent of all vanities.’’ As the fiction dating from 1851 on attests,Melville confessed ‘‘I did not think of Fame, a year ago, as I do now’’(Branch 249).

Regarding ‘‘Fame as the most transparent of all vanities,’’ Melvillebecame acutely aware of how the authors he read, even Solomon,‘‘managed the truth with a view to popular conservatism’’ (Branch 250).

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The ‘‘popular conservatism’’ he mentions, refers to the mass market ofreaders who expect particular genre conventions from particular authors.The Harper and Brother’s Book List persistently grouped Melville underthe heading of ‘‘Travel and Adventure’’ beginning in 1852, which be-came ‘‘Voyages and Travels’’ from 1853 to the end of the decade. Afterthe publication of Moby-Dick and especially Pierre, Harper felt the needto explain their classification of Melville under ‘‘Voyages and Travels’’ intheir 1855 book list. They highlighted his glorious tenure at sea vis-iting and writing about remote tropical islands and ‘‘primitive sociallife.’’ By keeping him under the ‘‘Voyages and Travels’’ genre classi-fication, Harper in effect decided that Melville would be most mar-ketable as ‘‘the man who lived among the cannibals’’: ‘‘The new pathstruck out by Melville in Typee and Omoo has led to a wide andbrilliant fame in a short space of time. Few of the younger AmericanAuthors are more extensively read and more universally admired,’’ theglowing first lines of the sales pitch ran (Harper Book List). The nextsegment more directly isolates his works as belonging to ‘‘Voyages andTravels’’: ‘‘His pictures of primitive social life in the islands of the SouthSea possess an irresistible charm. The works devoted to this subject areredolent of the spicy fragrance of the native forests, and glow with thesplendid lights of a tropical sky’’ (Harper Book List).

The failure to break free from such genre definitions in the literarymarketplace and fulfill the inner need to write the truth drives Pierremad, reflecting the psychosis Melville endured after 1852. From 1852to 1858, during and after the writing of Pierre, Melville suffered whatsome biographers, including Lewis Mumford, have described as a ner-vous break-down, or a ‘‘neurotic state.’’ Pierre’s sentiment echoes Mel-ville’s: ‘‘I have wandered in my mind; this book makes me mad’’ (Pierre363). The ‘‘random slips’’ from Pierre’s writing are much like Melville’sown. They glimpse the tortured heart of a character struggling in the‘‘pursuit of the highest health of virtue and truth,’’ trying desperatelyto ‘‘explain this darkness, exorcise this devil’’ (Pierre 356).

The nature of King’s misery in the early 1980s (Misery 1987) was acrisis that significantly linked alcoholism to authorship in a kind ofdouble-epiphany: the thought, ‘‘Holy shit, I’m an alcoholic,’’ struck himat precisely the same moment he realized The Shining was really abouthim, especially with its associations with writing as grinding laborleading to madness: the protagonist proclaims his insanity by writingin perfectly typed paragraphs and sentences ‘‘All work and no play

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makes Jack a dull boy’’ (On Writing 95). In a fit of writerly madness,Jack becomes a homicidal maniac who stalks his child with an ax. Outof King’s epiphany that The Shining was really about himself arose anawareness that much of his best work was coming from his own anal-ysis of his suffering as a professional author, and in particular, to hisslave labor within the confines of horror genre fiction.

King would consciously pour himself into the project of self-anal-ysis, with his professional angst mutually reinforcing the self-medi-cating that the protagonist, Paul of Misery would take up, jonesing forhis pain killers more and more as a way of getting back at Annie,carving some space away from her, and most importantly, killing thepain she had inflicted upon him. The horrifying paradox, of course, isthat King created the monster of Annie himself, not just as a fictionalcharacter, but as a profoundly powerful dimension of his career. Whenwe see Annie as an allegory of his own popular, mass readership that hehimself created, the link between professional anxiety and addictioncomes out in the open. King’s own interpretation of Annie in hismemoir—‘‘Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tiredof being Annie’s pet writer’’ (On Writing 98)—is a drastic oversimpli-fication designed to avoid offending and alienating the fan base that sheso obviously represents. King allegorized the author – reader/publisherrelationship in Misery, a writer’s nightmare of how a representativereader becomes a tyrannical editor forcing him to make manuscriptchanges under the threat of physical violence. ‘‘Work’’ implies struggle,negotiation, and pain.

King’s own way of dealing with that pain in his real life was by firstdrinking, a pastime he openly associated with authorship, according to‘‘The Hemingway Defense’’: ‘‘As a writer I am a very sensitive fellow,but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities.Only sissy men do that. Therefore I drink’’ (On Writing 94). Paul se-cretly dry swallows his medication, much in the way King gulps downbottles of Robitussin and mouthwash in the early eighties—not List-erine, but Scope: ‘‘It was tastier, had that hint of mint’’ (97). Humoraside, the substance abuse is really self-medication to kill the pain ofAnnie, the biggest of his horrors marked by the reality he faces whenhe sits down to write for his mass audience, increasing his popularitywhile simultaneously delimiting, and restricting his claims on canon-ical literary distinction. King’s sense of guilt for his self-indulgentdrug abuse, skyrocketing fame, and growth of his readership arises

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from his sense of proportional neglect of cultivating his talent, hisartistry. Anesthetizing himself from Annie is essentially an escape fromhis own self-invention as popular fiction writer. ‘‘How else can I facethe existential horror of it all and continue to work?’’ King asks (OnWriting 94).

King’s office was a kind of battleground on which he waged warwith Annie in a struggle to come to terms with his increasingly fixed,permanent role of popular paperback writer. Strewn with tokens ofequal parts power and self-destruction, his office he worked in duringthe early 1980s characterized his state of mind in the years leading upto Misery. His desk would signify hedonistic economic power throughits size and centrality: ‘‘a massive oak slab that would dominate aroom—no child’s desk in a trailer laundry-closet, no more crampedkneehole in a rented house . . . [I] placed it in the middle of a spaciousskylighted study . . . [and] sat behind that desk either drunk orwrecked out of my mind, like a ship’s captain in charge of a voyagenowhere’’ (On Writing 100). The tracks of substance abuse littered themighty desk. King’s wife (Starbuck to his Ahab?) collected it anddumped it out ‘‘on the rug: beer cans, cigarette butts, cocaine in grambottles and cocaine in plastic baggies, coke spoons caked with snot andblood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and NyQuilcold medication, even bottles of mouthwash’’ (On Writing 97). Such adisplay would make him second-guess his seemingly infallible autho-rial powers. ‘‘You have to be careful then, because if you fuck up’’ he re-membered thinking, he could roll his car or blow an interview on liveTV. The confrontation would inspire King to treat the problem in early1986, and if not eradicate it as a form of therapy, to dramatize it as itsown horror story in the pages of Misery.

Bev Vincent’s recent study shows that King believed that ‘‘The‘serious’ novelist is looking for answers; the ‘popular’ novelist is look-ing for an audience’’ (307). Misery was King’s attempt to escape hisaudience he too generously welcomed in, to liberate himself from theirtyranny, so that he could ‘‘look for answers.’’ The love/hate relationshipwould eventually go back to love, albeit masked and reserved in thededication to the last book of his Dark Tower series: ‘‘Constant Reader,this final book in the Dark Tower cycle is dedicated to you. My booksare my way of knowing you. Let them be your way of knowing me, aswell’’ (Dark Tower 7; qtd. in Vincent 272). Careful to keep his distanceby drawing the line between him and Constant Reader at the furthest

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point possible through the abstraction of the fictional story and theimpersonal physical commodity of the novel itself, he says, ‘‘It’senough’’ (Dark Tower 7; qtd. in Vincent 272).

In Misery, King’s hate toward Annie, his Constant Reader, is palpable:she’s a glutton not only for Paul’s novels but kitsch art including figurinesand Liberace, the aesthetic equivalent of the vanilla ice cream, ReddyWhip, and Hershey’s chocolate syrup she gulps down hungrily. She wantshim to read Danielle Steele; he wants to write like Mailer and Cheever.His first try at serious fiction is discovered in his car that crashes nearAnnie’s secluded mountain home; under the pretense of taking him in tonurse him back to health, she realizes she has her favorite author captive,and forces him to burn his gritty realism and bring back the heroine of theromance novels she loves. Her editorial methods include confinement,‘‘hobbling’’ (rebreaking Paul’s broken legs to prevent his escape) andthumb amputation. A gothic monster typical of King horror fiction, hemakes her even more hideous by revealing that she killed a series of babieswhile working as a maternity ward nurse. She seems flatly evil and thusserviceable for Paul’s final revenge: he feeds her hunger for his stories in afigurative rape in which he rams his burning manuscript down her throat,screaming ‘‘suck my book,’’ and delivering the death blow by smashingher skull with his typewriter, the object of his slavery (Misery 317).

Kathleen Margaret Lant has expanded on this passage to argue thatauthorship for King is about phallic power, equating pen with penis,and that specifically it subjugates his female readership to victims ofviolent rape (113). But Annie is also the fruit of his own gothicimagination and reflection of the well of fear he regularly taps for hismost salable tales, of his fear of being imprisoned and degraded by hisown popularity. Strengell recently has treated this passage as Paulkilling Annie the goddess, a kind of ‘‘Angel of Death,’’ tending to itsGothic and incestuous undertones convincingly, but not to the killingof King’s readership and thus himself as popular author (50). Theimage of consumption dominates the passage; he is ramming her full ofwhat she has been demanding all along, a kind of death by gorging onthe manuscript pages, complete with the full weight of the typewriteron her head, the locus of a reader’s consumption. In Misery, more thanthe pen, the typewriter more closely corresponds with the creativeprocess. Paul strengthens himself with it (lifting its weight physicallyto regain his muscle mass), and it becomes an object of contentionbetween he and Annie, much like the marked up manuscript pages he

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produces. Both of these, literally and figuratively, are the objects of hisassault on Annie, a hideously desperate, yet in some ways justifiablelashing out for freedom’s sake, like the distorted, perverse desperationof the incarcerated writer figure of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘‘TheYellow Wallpaper’’ who metaphorically kills her keeper at the end ofthat captivity narrative.

Paul’s view of Annie should not be defined by the figurative rapescene alone, as it shares space in the novel with a birth scene of sorts.Paul cries out from his bed as he labors with the narrative, and Annierushes in to lovingly lift him to his table (his legs are badly injured),her eyes wide at the emergence of the fruit of their author/readerrelationship. In a fascinating gender role reversal, she plays the expec-tant father. ‘‘She was looking at him respectfully and not with a littleawe,’’ nervously asking, ‘‘is it about the book?’’ to which Paul answerswith all the focus of a woman delivering a baby, determined to bringhis idea out into the world: ‘‘It is the book,’’ quite immanent andemergent. ‘‘Be quiet. Don’t talk to me’’ (Misery 165). Paul calls Anniein not to talk about their new creation, but to say most certainly, evenpainfully, it is coming out right now in the form of a plot device, theseed of an idea she had planted in him, all but insuring the completionof the work. Not surprisingly, the outcome is ‘‘a good deal moregruesome than the other Misery books’’ of the popular romance seriesPaul is famous for (Misery 167).

Although such hints at Annie’s redeemable qualities early in thenovel are only glancing—she makes him write, catches him illogically‘‘cheating’’ his way through the plot in order to kill off characters, andas she says, I ‘‘talk[ed] you out of a bad book you’d written and into thebest one you ever wrote’’—its conclusion brings King’s professionaldependence on her into the open (Misery 272). Such dependence, Iwould argue, is further evidence that Annie is an externalization ofPaul; she is his inner slave driver, the one to keep him honest, to keepspinning a yarn, and a damn good one, for nothing less than survival.Her opinion of his ‘‘best book,’’ King is satirizing ironically, of course.But his accomplishment, although a product of compromised ambi-tion, is nonetheless quite clear in this passage. There is no shortage ofswagger and cockiness in writing popular fiction well throughout thenovel. Paul even reflects on dominating creative writing classroomgames such as ‘‘CAN YOU?’’ which pits a character in a periloussituation and asks students to write his way to safety (Misery 203).

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After Annie’s death, King complicates her presence in Paul’s con-sciousness as not only a psychological force to be reckoned with inmenacing night terrors, but by squarely situating her in the context ofprofessional authorship through the image of Paul sitting down to writethe Serious Novel that Annie, his popular audience (and his popularfiction writing self), prevented. Ironically, she provides the muse—in-spiration through fear—for this new novel, a stab at the Mailer-Cheeverschool of gritty, urban realism so blasphemous to Paul’s army of romancereaders. For as much as King voices hate for Constant Reader—enoughto figuratively rape and kill her with sadistic vengeance—the saddertruth is that she is a part of Paul, occupying both psychological andprofessional parts of his identity, living beyond the novel’s conclusion,and well into King’s own professional career, as the dark muse that forceshim to remain a writer, nonetheless, in misery. Annie is both blessingand curse, for the alternative is to ‘‘cover the typewriter and study for mybroker’s license,’’ a figurative death of his authorial identity, a patheticand unacceptable form of professional suicide in the novel (Misery 352).

In a 1980 interview with Paul Janeczko, King was careful to mask anyaspiration to write literary fiction. King’s answer to the question of whathe felt he owed his readers is telling. ‘‘A good ride on the roller coaster,’’he again delimits with the phrase, ‘‘and that’s all,’’ thereby keeping hisfans at arm’s length (Underwood and Miller 78). The genre expectationsof that ride, of the precise, stylized nature of its thrills, which Paul/Kingbuilds up in the mind of Constant Reader are precisely the source oftension in Misery between Paul and Annie. King worried about failing hisreadership and the violent consequences in a 1984 interview, just twoyears before penning Misery: ‘‘I didn’t write [horror novels] to makemoney . . . the money’’ and readers ‘‘came to me,’’ he said, in a turn ofphrase that instantly amalgamates readers and money into one economicentity signifying profit, beneath which the ever present fear of losingbook sales becomes one and the same with alienating readers from theirgenre expectations: ‘‘people who like my stuff will come along unless youshortchange them’’ (Underwood 176). Annie is shortchanged, and Paulsuffers the consequences. Paul fears Annie as much as he needs her. Afterall, she calls his writing art and him an artist, ironically dignifying hishack writing as timeless literature through a staunch resistance to itsassociation with money: she reminds him that ‘‘when you pervert thetalent God gave you by calling it a business . . . you might as well callyourself a whore’’ (Misery 72).

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King’s conclusion, voiced through Paul, was to keep feedingAnnie, to keep his popular readers occupied to allow for serious fiction,something we clearly see in the recent shape of his career, as his worksrange between genre departures (likely attempts at ‘‘serious’’ fiction)and standard horror money makers, in which innovations are not nar-rative, but media (re)packaging through outlets like internet novelsand made-for-TV screenplays. Melville’s solution was much moredrastic and uncompromising: he chose to squander his early genrefiction success, unlike King, who continues to employ the ‘‘hard-hatand lunch pail’’ approach toward commercial fiction with several ex-ceptions, the most noteworthy being his latest novel, Lisey’s Story,whose protagonist, not coincidentally, is a popular novelist. Lisey’sStory, like Stationary Bike before it, is an attempt to enter the canonthrough a fictional self-examination of the perils of popular writing.Stationary Bike is King’s allegory of the meaning of the work of writingin his life, a popular effort that also obliquely aspires for literary dis-tinction, while justifying employing his commercial, blue-collar cre-ative construction crew (who take shape in the novel as alternatelysuicidal and homicidal) the majority of his career but not without alittle regret and even guilt. Melville’s refusal to write for money, on theother hand, would cement his own personal form of misery, increasinghis alienation from the professional circles in the literary marketplaceas well as vital relationships in his personal life that would bring onwhat Andrew Delbanco calls ‘‘the quiet end’’ (288). Unfortunately forMelville, he would be late for the celebratory din initiated by D. H.Lawrence and other modernists upon his revival in the 1920s that hasyet to end. Melville would not only speak to literary Modernism’saesthetic sensibilities, but to the twentieth century’s perils of popularwriting. Pierre anticipates Misery’s crisis of occupational self-definitionthat, as Jack Cady said of Melville, paints from ‘‘a palate of anguish’’ inwhich ‘‘personal pain translates straight across the story and displaysitself as torment’’ (98). The collision between canonical dreams andconsumer culture spark the professional rage and despair, if not in-sanity, that Melville and King fearlessly, viscerally unleash in a macabredance of art and money.

Notes

1. Milan Kundera, ‘‘What is a Novelist? How Great Writers are Made.’’

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2. Greg Smith defends King’s literary merit and ascribes causes to his exclusion from the literary

canon—a series of awful film versions of his novels combined with pigeon-holing in the

Gothic (schlock) horror genre—in ‘‘The Literary Equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries?: Ac-

ademics, Moralists, and the Stephen King Phenomenon.’’ More general studies that have

touched on fictional representations of professional anxiety in King, although limited and

ancillary include, The Stephen King Story: A Literary Profile and Stephen King: The Second Decade.3. Brian Doherty’s new history of libertarianism notes that Ronald Regan won the presidency in

1980 through a campaign that relied heavily on laissez-faire capitalist rhetoric. A telling

tableau appeared shortly after his election in a photograph of him on an airplane reading The

Freeman, the leading libertarian magazine, as his wife rested her head on his shoulder (114).

4. Many literary historians have noted that increases in population, literacy rates, ever more

efficient mail delivery and thus mass distribution, improved public education, and boosts in

the process of production of printed matter with the invention of the double-cylinder steam

press all contributed to unprecedented large-scale audiences in the 1840s and 50s. See, for

example, James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste; William

Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870; Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People:

Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public.5. Given limitations of space, I do not attempt to fill the gap between Melville and King’s

historical moments, although other works have certainly dealt directly with the same concerns

for literary fame in the gulf between them. Mid-twentieth century writers, for example, are

discussed in terms of the sublimation of authorial anxieties into their fiction in Lauren Glass’s

Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880 – 1980.

6. Shiela Post’s assertion that Pierre was not really a botched domestic novel tends to overstate the

case for it as a fully realized (at least on the level of form, genre, and style) version of the

sensational French romance novels popular at the time (129 – 40). If the work is to be con-

sidered a ‘‘popular’’ success for effectively drawing on such popular forms, one must overlook

the overwhelming evidence of its commercial and critical failure documented by Brian Hig-

gins and Hershel Parker.

Works Cited

Anon. ‘‘Review of Pierre.’’ Hartford Courant, 4 Aug. 1852. Eds. BrianHiggins, and Hershel Parker. Herman Melville: The ContemporaryReviews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print. 420 –21.

Branch, Watson G., Ed. Melville: The Critical Heritage. Boston: Rout-ledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. Print.

Cady, Jack. The American Writer. New York: St. Martin, 1999. Print.

Charvat, William. The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870:The Papers of William Charvat. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Columbus:Ohio State UP, 1968. Print.

Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and His Work. New York:Knopf, 2005. Print.

Doherty, Brian. Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of theModern American Libertarian Movement. New York: Public Affairs,2007. Print.

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Dryden, Edgar A. Monumental Melville: The Formation of a LiteraryCareer. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2004. Print.

Elliot, Emory. ‘‘‘Wandering To-and-Fro’: Melville and Religion.’’ A His-torical Guide to Herman Melville. Ed. Giles Gunn. Oxford: Oxford UP,2005. 167–204. Print.

Glass, Lauren. Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States,1880 – 1980. New York: New York UP, 2004. Print.

Goldstein, Bill.‘‘King of Horror.’’ Publisher’s Weekly 24 Jan. 1991: 6 – 9.Print.

Gunn, Giles. ‘‘Introduction.’’ A Historical Guide to Herman Melville. Ed.Giles Gunn. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 3 – 15. Print.

American Antiquarian Society Archive. Harper and Brothers Book List.New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855. Print.

Hart, James D. The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste.Berkeley: U of California P. Print.

Hazewell, Charles Creighton. ‘‘Review of Pierre’’ Boston Daily Times. 5Aug. 1852. Eds. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker. Herman Melville:The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.422.

Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker, eds. Herman Melville: TheContemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 419 – 52.

King, Stephen. Misery. New York: Signet, 1988. Print.

King, Stephen, and George Beahm, eds. The Stephen King Story: A LiteraryProfile. New York: GP, 1991. Print.

King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Scribner,2000. Print.

———. ‘‘The Literary Equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries?: Academics,Moralists, and the Stephen King Phenomenon.’’ Midwest Review 43(2002): 329– 46. Print.

———. ‘‘Acceptance Speech.’’ Distinguished Contribution to AmericanLetters Award. The National Book Foundation, National BookAward. 2003. Print.

———. Dark Tower. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.

Kundera, Milan.‘‘What is a Novelist? How Great Writers are Made.’’The New Yorker. 9 Oct. 2006: 40 – 5. Print.

Lant, Kathleen Margaret. ‘‘Rape of the Constant Reader: StephenKing’s Construction of the Female Reader and Violation of theFemale Body in Misery.’’ Journal of Popular Culture 30.4 (1997):89 – 114. Print.

Lyons, Paul. ‘‘Melville and his Precursors: Style as Metastyle and Allusion.’’American Literature 62 (1990): 445–63. Print.

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Magistrale, Tony. Stephen King: The Second Decade. New York: Twayne,1992. Print.

Melville, Herman. Pierre, or The Ambiguities. New York: Hendricks,1949. Print.

———. The Letters of Herman Melville. Ed. Merrell R. Davis. New Haven:Yale UP, 1965. Print.

———. Moby Dick. New York: Penguin, 1980. Print.Milder, Robert. Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine. Oxford:

Oxford UP, 2007. Print.Ozick, Cynthia. ‘‘Literary Entrails: The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing

Readers, and the Novel’s Ghostly Twin.’’ Harper’s Magazine 314.1883(April 2007): 67–75. Print.

Post-Lauria, Sheila. Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace.Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1996. Print.

Strengell, Heidi. Dissecting Stephen King: From Gothic to Literary Naturalism.Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2005. Print.

Vincent, Bev. The Road to the Dark Tower: Exploring Stephen King’sMagnum Opus. New York: New American Library, 2004. Print.

Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller. Bare Bones: Conversations on Terrorwith Stephen King. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988. Print.

Zboray, Ronald J. A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development andthe American Reading Public. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Print.

David Dowling, lecturer in English at the University of Iowa, has publishednumerous books and articles on nineteenth-century American authorshipand the literary marketplace, including The Business of Literary Circles inNineteenth-Century America (2011), Capital Letters: Authorship in the AntebellumLiterary Market (2009), and Literary Partnerships: Writers and Mentors inNineteenth-Century America (to appear in 2012). His work on Melville includesa recent article in Leviathan, and his 2010 book, Chasing the White Whale: TheMoby-Dick Marathon; or, What Melville Means Today. His current book projectis on the mentoring and marketing of Emerson’s proteges.

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