As American young men and Vietnamese soldiers fought and died in the jungles and rice fields of Vietnam, students in the U.S. watched in horror, organizing together to oppose the war. At the University of Maine, a young Stephen King joined other students in opposing the war, listening to the lies of the country’s leaders as more than 500,000 troops were sent to fight a half-a-world away.

How did that experience flavor King’s work? How did the world’s most successful writer of speculative fiction weave those events into his writing?

This is one of the questions that Professor Anthony Magistrale and his former student, Michael J. Blouin, set out to answer in their new book, Stephen King and American History.

“What we began to realize was that this disillusionment that King had about what had happened to America (at that time), both in terms of its official governmental policy and the use of the military and the way in which the counterculture reacted to it had led to so many of the negative aspects that King looks at America,” Magistrale said.

The more Magistrale and Blouin dug, the more they found a relationship between the Vietnam experience and King’s portrayal of topics from child abuse to small town America to American institutions like church, government, and military. The same themes they found in Dream Catcher and Hearts in Atlantis soon led them to new analysis of Pet Sematary and The Shining, among other works.

Blouin and Magistrale turned also to other topics little explored by King critics. They take on homophobia and homosexuality in one chapter and dive into new texts like the Institute, Cell, and Mr. Mercedes that have little written about them.

“This is an interesting book because this was not just an analysis of Stephen King's work, it was also a way in which we put it into a cultural context. How do these works that we're talking about, like homosexuality and Vietnam, speak to us and enlighten us about American culture?” Magistrale said.

Stephen King’s reach permeates across American literature, film, and culture. The only book surpassing King in copies sold is the Bible. King has been the source and screenwriter for nearly a hundred Hollywood movies including The Shawshank Redemption.

Magistrale was drawn to King early in his career and has written about the prolific writer frequently. “It’s hard to pigeonhole him,” Magistrale said. “He's written a lot of different kinds of books. He writes detective fiction. He writes horror fiction. He writes about prisons. I don't think anyone writes about prisons better than he does,” Magistrale said.

But this book is new for Magistrale because the book is co-written with his former student Michael Blouin, now an English professor at Milligan University.

“Michael kept saying we need to write a book together. We need to write a book,” Magistrale said.

When Magistrale went on sabbatical three years ago, he finally agreed.

Blouin was Magistrale’s student in the late ’90s. Magistrale found himself always looking forward to reading Blouin’s assignments which were original and fascinating. As a professor, Magistrale got to watch him grow. As a colleague, he continued to enjoy Blouin’s energy.

“It just became really interesting to watch the way Michael would help to energize so much of what I was trying to do in this book and the way in which we had this kind of give and take, you know the way teachers and great students interact with each other,” Magistrale said.

After 37 years of teaching at UVM, Magistrale continues to find himself excited by students like Blouin. He enjoys seeing a student ask questions and interact with the material in ways that move them into deeper ranges of consciousness, watching them catch fire, Magistrale said

The veteran teacher’s voice lifted in enthusiasm when he described a recent interaction in a classroom. The discovery that lit up students faces as they connected COVID-19 with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” -- a response to the Cholera epidemic in 1832.

Teaching amidst the pandemic is like teaching again for the first time, Magistrale said. And sometimes he thinks of himself as an one of the characters in a King novel.

“So you do what King characters are forced to do” Magistrale suggests. “You adjust to the extraordinary circumstances that you find yourself in.”

Olivia Nye is a Studio Art and English Junior with a minor in Applied Design.