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The Stand 1st (first) Edition by King, Stephen published by Doubleday (1978) Hardcover
From personal private collection. Copyright 1978 Book Club Edition, First Printing. Has no creases or marks on spine & cover, binding is good and tight, pages are clean and intact, No shelve wear on cover. No writing inside book. DJ has lot of wear. See Picture
Hardcover
Published October 3, 1978
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20 people want to read
About the author
Stephen King
2,640 books884k followersStephen Edwin King was born the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his father left them when Stephen was two, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of them. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.
Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.
He met Tabitha Spruce in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University, where they both worked as students; they married in January of 1971. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines.
Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many were gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching English at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.
Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.
He met Tabitha Spruce in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University, where they both worked as students; they married in January of 1971. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines.
Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many were gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching English at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.
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July 8, 2025
When people ask me my favorite book, I say Stephen King’s The Stand without much hesitation, my stock answer of the past thirty years. I first started reading it at the end of my junior year in high school, plowing through it over the summer and finishing it in the fall of my senior year. I read it again years later to test the theory and it held up. Yep, still my favorite book. I had been thinking about reading it again as of late, finding, in my late forties, trained as an English teacher and currently working as a high school librarian, that it is interesting to go back and read the favorites of my youth, some of them holding up remarkably well while others turn out to be just plain awful. Where would The Stand, Stephen King's magnum opus, first released in 1979 and largely considered to be his best novel “stand,” (pun intended)?
In short, Stephen King’s The Stand is nothing short of a masterpiece, a monumental piece of fiction on an epic scale, made more impressive by the fact that King wrote it in the mid-seventies, when he was just getting off the ground as a published author. While he has bristled at the notion that something he wrote more than forty years ago is his best work, there’s little doubt that The Stand is just that. It is King at his best: meticulously researched (how the hell does he know, in an age that predated the internet, for example, so many streets, roads, and landmarks in states across the US?), crafted with at times Dickensian prose, with his most robust and beloved cast of characters as his entire canon, The Stand is just one of those moments for an artist when they catch lightning in a bottle. For some of them, it happens after an entire body of work, and in the case of King, it happened early.
The Stand is all these things, and more. It is also overly long, more than a little over-indulgent, and full of a lot of cringey moments that haven’t aged well.
There’s little point in going into the plot here; anyone pausing to read this has probably read it or at least seen one of the mini-series, and if they haven’t, there are plenty of good sources out there for a summary. Summed up concisely, however, the plot may sound something like, “Killer virus plus good vs. evil.” In short, like most speculative fiction, not all that original by itself, but the way King does it, the way he did everything in those early years, was in a way no one had ever read before. King understood, as all good writers do, that the key to any plot is good characters, and The Stand is full of rich, unique characters, so many with their own personalities and unique voices it can make your head spin, some of whom are beloved icons for King’s “Constant Readers,” as he calls us. And yet, in an early 21st-century read, some of these characters are, well, kind of jerks.
Larry Underwood, one of the leaders of the Boulder Free Zone, for example, is kind of a jackass and hardly likeable for three quarters of the novel. That’s supposed to be part of the point for his character, that he changes a lot, but it takes a long time to do it, and he shares the stage with dozens and dozens of others. Stu Redman, without the compassionate, gentle performance of a Gary Sinise, also isn’t as likable as he has been portrayed on screen. His stories of getting drunk, going to whorehouses, and what not, make him appear precisely like the stereotype he seems to be trying to avoid. Lloyd Henreid, who is a villain, is portrayed as so dim and so stupid it’s shocking Flagg chose him to be his right-hand man, and then there’s the Man himself, the Dark Man, that is, Randal Flagg, the Walking Dude, the Man with No Face. He’s an iconic villain in Stephen King lore, and rightfully so, he’s humorous, affable, and deadly, sometimes seeming very powerful and other times seeming rather limited in his capabilities. Thus, he’s unpredictable. And yet, and I had forgotten this, he isn’t in the book much, other than the nightmares the survivors have, until the last quarter of the book, and is somewhat underused. He only gets chapters and long passages dedicated him toward the end of the book, when the society he made in Las Vegas is already on his way out.
King has been criticized for his portrayal of African American characters in the past, and his characterization of Mother Abigail fits into the over-used trope of the Magical Negro (before you start thinking cancel, I didn't invent the tern), that is a person of African descent that has some special power, insight, or ability others don't (he also did this with Dick Halloran in The Shining). What's different about Mother Abigail, I suppose, is her uniqueness comes from her faith, which at times can also be seen as something of a stereotype, however.
The Stand is so full of detail and research, you can get lost in it. King does a masterful job of describing, in 19th century level detail, the cities, towns, and states that appear in the story, as well as exhaustive information on how viruses work, the military, etc., and yet, sometimes, it’s just a little too much, especially when he dives into people who will only be on the page for a mere chapter. There are some sequences, whether it be when people are walking, clearing out the dead, trying to scramble up a dirt hill, or trudge through the snow, that just feel too damn long. Perhaps, in my old age, I have a serious case of Reader's ADD. Maybe it is because I know how it ends and just want to get to it, I don’t know.
And there is a lot of dated stuff in the book. I would say at least three times, a woman gets slapped by an impatient, frustrated man, and there are a lot of N-words. This is not King’s only book that has them, and to be very clear, they don’t come out of the mouths of our protagonists. It is very worth pointing out that it is only the bad guys that use them in scenes that are supposed to reveal character. King has always done a good job of getting into his character’s heads, even the psychos and scumbags, and that is what he is doing here, but in 2025, it doesn’t read well, especially when they pop up so often. Nor do some of the long and unnecessary sex scenes. I am not a huge fan of sex in books and movies, not to say that I am a prude, but I just find them mostly awkward and unnecessary, and that is certainly the case with some of them here. Mother Abigail fondly remembering her sex life as a younger woman is a bit cringe, so are some of the Frannie/Stu love scenes, as well as Harold Lauder’s with Nadine Cross. These things don’t detract much from the book, and it is important to remember that Stephen King was born in the 1940s and grew up in a small town, probably spending plenty of time around people who used N-words, R words, and what not, and if some of that makes you not like a certain character, that is probably the idea.
On a practical level, and in spite of the voluminous size of the book, I think the progress both the people of Boulder and Las Vegas make – getting the lights on, forming societies, everybody having a role and a job, happens a little too quickly. The majority of the book only takes place over a 100 days, not enough time, if you asked me, to create a whole working city, especially when they'd be surrounded by millions of corpses. Of course, the plot has to move on, especially in a book that is already so long.
One thing I had forgotten, perhaps my more optimistic and carefree younger self just glossing over these parts, is that King does a really good job of describing, in horrible detail, the collapse of society and all the awful things people do to each other as a result thereof. As an adult, the massive violence, the collapse of the social order, these are some of the scariest and best written things in the novel.
All these criticisms aside, and if you think about it, they’re all pretty superficial, The Stand is a tour de force. King’s command of language is on full display. He is at times his typically funny self, making you laugh out loud at some awful thing a character says or does, at other times dropping truths about life as good as any other American writer out there. I have always said King writes the everyman as good as anyone, and that is absolutely true about The Stand, it’s a book full of everyday men and woman thrown into a terrible circumstance that have to work together to fight their way out of it, a masterpiece about the pride of mankind and its irresponsibility in creating weapons of mass destruction and the horrible things men and woman do to each other while at the same time, a picture of the best of humanity, too. While King has stated often over the years he is something of an agnostic, he is clearly interested in religious thought and draws heavily on it here, another primary theme of the novel is good triumphing over evil. I think at his core, King is an optimist. He was then and still is now, and I believe The Stand, which certainly could be interpreted as having a religious center at its core, is also about people working together, making the most of the choices they make. The appeal of apocalyptic stories, I believe, is just this: thrown together, strangers must form a small, tight-knit society based on common interest where everyone is important, everyone has a role. Some of these get a second chance and achieve redemption, others do not. And our core group of survivors are all great characters, even if they, like Larry Underwood and even Stu, can be a little rough around the edges. By the end of the novel, both are heroes and leaders. There are other characters, like Tom Cullen, Glen Bateman, and Nick Andros, that shine on the page the moment they first appear.
While some characters come off as jerky at times, that perhaps is some of the point. These may be righteous people, ultimately, but they are people nonetheless, human in all their flaws. By the end of the book, you can forgive most of them for them. Even Harold Lauder has a brief moment, if not at redemption, at least remorse, as he contemplates his choices, regretting them.
Reading the book this time made me wonder, was the battle in Las Vegas for all mankind or just America? There is a point in the book where Flagg ponders the fact that there may be others “like him” across the world, whether he meant leaders of men or supernatural beings, he doesn’t say, and it made me wonder what was happening in the rest of the world while Glen, Stu, Larry, Tom, Frannie, and the like were making their way to Boulder. At this stage in the game, it is highly unlikely that King would return to that world, and that is probably a good thing. Ultimately, when a book makes you think beyond its pages, the author has done his or her job already.
There was probably a lot that went over my head upon reading The Stand back in ’93-’94. I probably identified more with Harold Lauder, the chubby, bullied, aspiring writer than say, Stu Redmond, hell, I probably still do, and yet, there was something in the book all those decades ago that spoke to me as a teenager, imprinting on me that this, The Stand, was my favorite book, an idea I couldn’t shake. At 48, closer in age to Glen Batemen than Larry Underwood, it’s still my favorite damn book in the world.
For more reviews, go to www.jasonandrewparker.com
In short, Stephen King’s The Stand is nothing short of a masterpiece, a monumental piece of fiction on an epic scale, made more impressive by the fact that King wrote it in the mid-seventies, when he was just getting off the ground as a published author. While he has bristled at the notion that something he wrote more than forty years ago is his best work, there’s little doubt that The Stand is just that. It is King at his best: meticulously researched (how the hell does he know, in an age that predated the internet, for example, so many streets, roads, and landmarks in states across the US?), crafted with at times Dickensian prose, with his most robust and beloved cast of characters as his entire canon, The Stand is just one of those moments for an artist when they catch lightning in a bottle. For some of them, it happens after an entire body of work, and in the case of King, it happened early.
The Stand is all these things, and more. It is also overly long, more than a little over-indulgent, and full of a lot of cringey moments that haven’t aged well.
There’s little point in going into the plot here; anyone pausing to read this has probably read it or at least seen one of the mini-series, and if they haven’t, there are plenty of good sources out there for a summary. Summed up concisely, however, the plot may sound something like, “Killer virus plus good vs. evil.” In short, like most speculative fiction, not all that original by itself, but the way King does it, the way he did everything in those early years, was in a way no one had ever read before. King understood, as all good writers do, that the key to any plot is good characters, and The Stand is full of rich, unique characters, so many with their own personalities and unique voices it can make your head spin, some of whom are beloved icons for King’s “Constant Readers,” as he calls us. And yet, in an early 21st-century read, some of these characters are, well, kind of jerks.
Larry Underwood, one of the leaders of the Boulder Free Zone, for example, is kind of a jackass and hardly likeable for three quarters of the novel. That’s supposed to be part of the point for his character, that he changes a lot, but it takes a long time to do it, and he shares the stage with dozens and dozens of others. Stu Redman, without the compassionate, gentle performance of a Gary Sinise, also isn’t as likable as he has been portrayed on screen. His stories of getting drunk, going to whorehouses, and what not, make him appear precisely like the stereotype he seems to be trying to avoid. Lloyd Henreid, who is a villain, is portrayed as so dim and so stupid it’s shocking Flagg chose him to be his right-hand man, and then there’s the Man himself, the Dark Man, that is, Randal Flagg, the Walking Dude, the Man with No Face. He’s an iconic villain in Stephen King lore, and rightfully so, he’s humorous, affable, and deadly, sometimes seeming very powerful and other times seeming rather limited in his capabilities. Thus, he’s unpredictable. And yet, and I had forgotten this, he isn’t in the book much, other than the nightmares the survivors have, until the last quarter of the book, and is somewhat underused. He only gets chapters and long passages dedicated him toward the end of the book, when the society he made in Las Vegas is already on his way out.
King has been criticized for his portrayal of African American characters in the past, and his characterization of Mother Abigail fits into the over-used trope of the Magical Negro (before you start thinking cancel, I didn't invent the tern), that is a person of African descent that has some special power, insight, or ability others don't (he also did this with Dick Halloran in The Shining). What's different about Mother Abigail, I suppose, is her uniqueness comes from her faith, which at times can also be seen as something of a stereotype, however.
The Stand is so full of detail and research, you can get lost in it. King does a masterful job of describing, in 19th century level detail, the cities, towns, and states that appear in the story, as well as exhaustive information on how viruses work, the military, etc., and yet, sometimes, it’s just a little too much, especially when he dives into people who will only be on the page for a mere chapter. There are some sequences, whether it be when people are walking, clearing out the dead, trying to scramble up a dirt hill, or trudge through the snow, that just feel too damn long. Perhaps, in my old age, I have a serious case of Reader's ADD. Maybe it is because I know how it ends and just want to get to it, I don’t know.
And there is a lot of dated stuff in the book. I would say at least three times, a woman gets slapped by an impatient, frustrated man, and there are a lot of N-words. This is not King’s only book that has them, and to be very clear, they don’t come out of the mouths of our protagonists. It is very worth pointing out that it is only the bad guys that use them in scenes that are supposed to reveal character. King has always done a good job of getting into his character’s heads, even the psychos and scumbags, and that is what he is doing here, but in 2025, it doesn’t read well, especially when they pop up so often. Nor do some of the long and unnecessary sex scenes. I am not a huge fan of sex in books and movies, not to say that I am a prude, but I just find them mostly awkward and unnecessary, and that is certainly the case with some of them here. Mother Abigail fondly remembering her sex life as a younger woman is a bit cringe, so are some of the Frannie/Stu love scenes, as well as Harold Lauder’s with Nadine Cross. These things don’t detract much from the book, and it is important to remember that Stephen King was born in the 1940s and grew up in a small town, probably spending plenty of time around people who used N-words, R words, and what not, and if some of that makes you not like a certain character, that is probably the idea.
On a practical level, and in spite of the voluminous size of the book, I think the progress both the people of Boulder and Las Vegas make – getting the lights on, forming societies, everybody having a role and a job, happens a little too quickly. The majority of the book only takes place over a 100 days, not enough time, if you asked me, to create a whole working city, especially when they'd be surrounded by millions of corpses. Of course, the plot has to move on, especially in a book that is already so long.
One thing I had forgotten, perhaps my more optimistic and carefree younger self just glossing over these parts, is that King does a really good job of describing, in horrible detail, the collapse of society and all the awful things people do to each other as a result thereof. As an adult, the massive violence, the collapse of the social order, these are some of the scariest and best written things in the novel.
All these criticisms aside, and if you think about it, they’re all pretty superficial, The Stand is a tour de force. King’s command of language is on full display. He is at times his typically funny self, making you laugh out loud at some awful thing a character says or does, at other times dropping truths about life as good as any other American writer out there. I have always said King writes the everyman as good as anyone, and that is absolutely true about The Stand, it’s a book full of everyday men and woman thrown into a terrible circumstance that have to work together to fight their way out of it, a masterpiece about the pride of mankind and its irresponsibility in creating weapons of mass destruction and the horrible things men and woman do to each other while at the same time, a picture of the best of humanity, too. While King has stated often over the years he is something of an agnostic, he is clearly interested in religious thought and draws heavily on it here, another primary theme of the novel is good triumphing over evil. I think at his core, King is an optimist. He was then and still is now, and I believe The Stand, which certainly could be interpreted as having a religious center at its core, is also about people working together, making the most of the choices they make. The appeal of apocalyptic stories, I believe, is just this: thrown together, strangers must form a small, tight-knit society based on common interest where everyone is important, everyone has a role. Some of these get a second chance and achieve redemption, others do not. And our core group of survivors are all great characters, even if they, like Larry Underwood and even Stu, can be a little rough around the edges. By the end of the novel, both are heroes and leaders. There are other characters, like Tom Cullen, Glen Bateman, and Nick Andros, that shine on the page the moment they first appear.
While some characters come off as jerky at times, that perhaps is some of the point. These may be righteous people, ultimately, but they are people nonetheless, human in all their flaws. By the end of the book, you can forgive most of them for them. Even Harold Lauder has a brief moment, if not at redemption, at least remorse, as he contemplates his choices, regretting them.
Reading the book this time made me wonder, was the battle in Las Vegas for all mankind or just America? There is a point in the book where Flagg ponders the fact that there may be others “like him” across the world, whether he meant leaders of men or supernatural beings, he doesn’t say, and it made me wonder what was happening in the rest of the world while Glen, Stu, Larry, Tom, Frannie, and the like were making their way to Boulder. At this stage in the game, it is highly unlikely that King would return to that world, and that is probably a good thing. Ultimately, when a book makes you think beyond its pages, the author has done his or her job already.
There was probably a lot that went over my head upon reading The Stand back in ’93-’94. I probably identified more with Harold Lauder, the chubby, bullied, aspiring writer than say, Stu Redmond, hell, I probably still do, and yet, there was something in the book all those decades ago that spoke to me as a teenager, imprinting on me that this, The Stand, was my favorite book, an idea I couldn’t shake. At 48, closer in age to Glen Batemen than Larry Underwood, it’s still my favorite damn book in the world.
For more reviews, go to www.jasonandrewparker.com
July 19, 2024
What a beast of a book. Masterfully crafted. King at his best. Though I much prefer his creepier tales.
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