The Kings of Fiction

"Basically, they had payroll for one big writer," Stephen says. Before the dust settled, he'd changed publishers. Shortly afterward, his wife had no publisher at all. "Basically I got fired," she says.

Years later, she was asked to complete a book called "Candles Burning," by her old friend Michael McDowell, who died before he could finish it. It came out in 2006. She has a couple of other novels in a drawer, but no publisher for them.

The last decade or so "has been a difficult time . . . for what they used to call the midlist writer," she says.

Nobody would ever call Stephen King a midlist writer, and he'll never have trouble finding a publisher. He does have some issues, however, with getting respect.

"A lot of people are dismissive of Steve's work who have never read it," Tabitha says. "There is actually this huge range. It's not all guts and monsters." When people tell her they don't read his books because they don't like scary stuff, she sometimes asks if they've seen "The Green Mile" or "Stand by Me." When they say yes, she tells them they've seen her husband's stories onscreen.

There is a widespread notion that "if you sell a lot of books, you've got to be peddling crap," she adds, and the problem is, it's sometimes true. There are big-name authors who "can't write and they can't plot."

"But we won't mention any names. Like James Patterson," Stephen says.

In 2003, the National Book Foundation gave King its special medal for "distinguished contribution to American letters." There was some grumbling among the literati, and in his acceptance speech at the National Book Awards that year, King grumbled back. Thanking the members of the foundation's board, "who took a huge risk in giving this award to a man many people see as a rich hack," he argued that "bridges can be built between the so-called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction" and urged the foundation to consider the best popular writers for its regular awards.

"What do you think? You get social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?" he asked.

This made news, of course. It's part of a debate that won't be over anytime soon. But if you go back and read King's speech, you'll see that it wasn't the most important thing he had to talk about that night.

He spent more than half his time thanking his wife for his career.

When he and Tabitha were starting out, he said, "we lived in a trailer and she made a writing space for me in the tiny laundry room." When they had two kids, menial jobs and no money, she never once said, "Why don't you quit spending three hours a night" trying to write?