At a Marriott Hotel in New York City this week, the National Book Foundation plans to hand Stephen King its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Previous recipients of the medal include Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller and Toni Morrison, which makes King, an unrepentant horror monger, a controversial choice, to say the least. Shakespeare scholar and self-appointed canonmaker Harold Bloom called it a "terrible mistake" and added that King was an "immensely inadequate writer."
News of King's crowning met with predictable sneers from the literary snobs, along with a few weak and equally predictable cheers from the reverse...
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