The only author who made Stephen King jealous: “This guy is so far beyond what I can do”
There isn’t much in the literary sphere that can make Stephen King jealous, seeing as he’s achieved more success than almost any other author of the last half-century who isn’t named JK Rowling.
Of course, neither of them are going to win the most prestigious prizes for their prose, and one of them has done a sterling job of alienating a huge section of their fanbase, but they’ve got most other scribes beaten where it really counts: selling a shitload of books, and making a shitload of money.
King’s novels, novellas, short stories, and nonfiction books have shifted over 350 million copies since Carrie hit shelves in 1974, making him one of the bestselling authors of all time. Beyond that, he’s made another small fortune from Hollywood, with the industry unable to satiate its appetite for bringing his tales to screens, big or small.
He’s a populist, and he knows it. One of the major recurring criticisms levelled at King throughout the years is that he’s a ‘popcorn writer’ who sticks to what he knows and never tries too hard to write anything that the critics are fawning over, but he doesn’t give a shit, and why should he?
Not every aspiring writer grows up dreaming of Pulitzer Prizes and being the subject of glowing admiration and adoration from the decidedly snooty literary subset, and besides, even people who’ve never even looked at one of his books know who Stephen King is because he’s become a pop culture entity unto himself.
That doesn’t mean he isn’t susceptible to the odd hint of jealousy, though, and it might even explain why King invested so much time and effort into creating The Dark Tower, a sprawling fantasy saga featuring voluminous amounts of world-building, a dense mythology, and homages to multiple different genres.
During a Q&A with his son, Joe Hill, King was asked if there were any notable books he wished he’d written himself. While he admitted that “there’s thousands of them,” there was one that made him realise that no matter how hard he tried or how much he applied himself to his creative pursuits, some things will always remain permanently out of reach.
“I guess the book I was most jealous of was The Lord of the Rings,” he confessed. “I read that and I said, ‘This guy is so far beyond what I can do.'” To be fair, nobody else could have written it apart from J.R.R. Tolkien, and it would be an understatement to say that he put in plenty of research to ensure Middle-earth felt as real on the page as it did in his imagination.
The mammoth trilogy has always been one of King’s favourites, and he was as inspired by Tolkien as anyone else who made a career dabbling in the otherworldly side of literature. You’d expect that most folks who’ve written a fantasy book would be jealous of the fact that they didn’t come up with the idea for The Lord of the Rings, and there’s no shame in that when it’s one of the most famous and influential ever written.
