The Dark Tower

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of addiction, mental illness, and death.

Born in 1947 in Portland, Maine, Stephen King began writing at an early age. After years of struggling with odd jobs and rejection slips, he achieved breakthrough success in 1974 with Carrie. King soon became a household name, publishing a string of bestsellers, including The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978), and It (1986). Though he became known for horror, King often defies strict categorization, writing novellas, dramas, and even nonfiction. His work explores themes of childhood, trauma, addiction, redemption, and the power of storytelling. King was often dismissed by critics in his early career, who viewed him as a genre writer without literary merit. However, King always saw his work as part of a grander literary tradition, drawing inspiration from the likes of J. R. R. Tolkien, William Faulkner, and Robert Browning. With The Dark Tower, King set out to craft a series that would tie together his thematic concerns, literary influences, and narrative interests into one epic tale.

The origins of The Dark Tower can be traced back to King’s college years. One of his major inspirations was the poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came by Robert Browning, from which he took both the title and the symbolic core of the story. Equally influential was J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. King admired Tolkien’s ability to create a rich secondary world with its own languages, histories, and moral dimensions. King wanted to create a similarly epic quest grounded in fantasy but fused with distinctly American motifs, especially those from the Western genre. Roland Deschain, the series’ central character, was conceived as a “gunslinger” reminiscent of Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, but operating in a surreal, decaying world.

King began writing the first volume, The Gunslinger, in 1970 while still in college, but it was not published in its initial form until 1982. Over the next two decades, the series progressed slowly, with King publishing sequels sporadically: The Drawing of the Three (1987), The Waste Lands (1991), and Wizard and Glass (1997). These books deepened the mythology of the series’ fantasy setting, called Mid-World, introduced new characters (like Eddie Dean, Susannah, and Jake), and expanded the quest narrative. During this time, King’s personal struggles with addiction, fame, and self-doubt increasingly influenced the tone of the series. Roland, the protagonist, became a reflection of King himself: obsessed with reaching the Tower, alienated from others, and driven by an inner compulsion that he cannot fully understand. As the story progressed, King blurred the lines between creator and creation, eventually inserting himself as a character into the narrative.

A turning point came in 1999 when King was seriously injured in a car accident (the basis for an extended sequence in the novel in which Jake and Roland must save his life). Confronted with his mortality, he realized that The Dark Tower might remain unfinished if he died. This led to a burst of productivity; between 2003 and 2004, he published the final three volumes: Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah, and The Dark Tower. These books brought the series to a controversial but thematically resonant conclusion, emphasizing the cyclical nature of quests, the consequences of obsession, and the redemptive power of storytelling. In 2012, King returned to the series with The Wind Through the Keyhole, a standalone novel set between earlier volumes. While not a direct continuation, it provided additional context and further enriched the mythos.

Beyond its surface narrative, The Dark Tower is a meta-narrative: a story about stories. The Tower itself serves as a metaphor for all reality and imagination, with each level representing different worlds and possibilities. Many of King’s other works—It, The Stand, ‘Salem’s Lot, and others—are connected to The Dark Tower in subtle or overt ways. Characters, symbols, places, and even King himself reappear across novels, creating a vast shared universe where the Tower stands at the center.