ABSTRACT
It would be difficult to overstate the impact of the Vietnam War upon Stephen King. As a college student at the University of Maine at Orono (UMO) from 1966 to 1970, he was utterly transformed by the conflict, torn apart—like many members of his generation—by a growing chasm between the comfortable fantasies of middle-class America and the grotesque realities of combat. The crisis in Vietnam would prove to be King’s crucible, the event that most dramatically transformed him into the contemporary chronicler of America’s nightmares. And yet, surprisingly, there exist no sustained critical analyses of how the Vietnam War shaped King’s fiction, or what his works reveal about this grim interval in American History. In this chapter, we examine how two of King’s novels—Hearts in Atlantis (1999) and Dreamcatcher (2001)—explore America’s deep psychic wounds that have not yet healed. Few King scholars and readers appreciate sufficiently the degree to which both his fiction and his life have been influenced by the political consciousness that emerged during his formative years at UMO. While most Americans politicized in the Sixties had by the Seventies and Eighties rejoined the mainstream establishment in order to make money and advance careers, King has held true to the political awareness he incurred as an undergraduate, and novels such as Dreamcatcher and Hearts in Atlantis reflect this awareness.
