Stephen King and American Politics

From The Long Walk to The Outsider, Stephen King’s prolific output reflects the major political concerns in America for the last fifty years. Stephen King and American Politics is the first sustained study of the complex ways in which King’s texts speak to their unique political moments. By exploring this aspect of the author’s popular works, readers might better understand the numerous crises that Americans currently face. Surveying King’s corpus to address a wide range of issues, including the spread of late capitalism, the Bush-Cheney doctrine, and the chaos of the populist present. Although his fiction may outwardly declare itself to be anti-political, political energies persist between the lines. Given the possibility of a political resurgence that haunts so many of his page-turners, Stephen King produces horror and hope in equal measure.