The Gunslinger is a remarkable story for many reasons. Not only is it one of King’s earliest works, begun in 1970 when he was a 19 year-old sophomore at University of Maine, it is one of only two that he would revise later in his career — The Stand is the other.
Originally serialized as five short stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1978 to 1981, The Gunslinger was finally published as a book in 1982, the first of seven in the Dark Tower cycle. Twenty-one years later, King substantially revised it, adding about 35 pages, an introduction and foreword.
Feeling that it suffered from an overuse of adverbs and was a difficult start for new readers, King worked to improve the storytelling and resolve continuity errors introduced in later books. “The Gunslinger had been written by a very young man,” King remarks in the foreword, “and had all the problems of a very young man’s book.” You can find a list of the revisions here.
Major influences for the novel include Sergio Leone’s 1966 film The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Robert Browning’s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. The Gunslinger’s protagonist, Roland of Gilead, and his quest for the Dark Tower is derived from Browning’s poem, whereas his image is inspired by the “Man with No Name” portrayed in Leone’s film by Clint Eastwood.
After seeing the film in an almost completely empty theater, King realized he wanted to write a novel with “Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic but set against Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop.” As King writes in the Introduction, Eastwood appeared “eighteen feet tall,” with each jut of stubble “the size of a young redwood tree,” and gun barrels “large as the Holland Tunnel.” In The Gunslinger, King wanted to create a feeling of apocalyptic size — an epic.
It’s dangerous, of course, to pay too much attention to what a writer says about their own work — “ill-informed bullshit,” King would say — but King, whose writing is remarkably accessible, may be the exception not the rule. When he says, “I wanted to write not just a long book, but the longest popular novel in history,” we genuinely believe him.
Opening Line: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
Join me as I follow Mid-World’s last gunslinger, Roland Deschain, into the Mohaine Desert, as he searches for the enigmatic man in black and the Dark Tower.
1982, First Edition
The Aberrant Rag 