Stephen King

Stephen King is one of the best-selling and most influential American novelists of the modern era, known primarily for horror but ranging freely across suspense, science fiction, and fantasy across a bibliography of more than sixty novels. His Dark Tower series, an eight-book epic begun with The Gunslinger in 1982 and completed over more than three decades, sits at the center of King's wider fictional universe, following gunslinger Roland Deschain across a decaying, dreamlike world and threading connections to many of King's other novels along the way.

King worked as a teacher and struggled financially before his debut novel, Carrie, sold in 1974 and launched a career defined by both extraordinary commercial success and, over time, real critical respect, including the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. His work has been adapted for film and television more often than perhaps any other living novelist -- The Shining, It, Carrie, The Shawshank Redemption, and Stand by Me among the most celebrated -- and the Dark Tower itself reached the screen in a 2017 film that compressed and reordered elements from across the book series.

A new reader coming to the Dark Tower specifically should start with The Gunslinger, though King himself has noted its slower, more experimental style differs from the rest of the series; readers new to King generally are often pointed instead toward a standalone like The Shining or Carrie.