Tom J. Hillard, an associate professor in the Department of English, recently gave a presentation titled “Stephen King’s Colorado: The American West of The Shining” at the Western Literature Association annual meeting in Estes Park, Colorado.
The presentation focused on the ways that Stephen King’s experiences living in Colorado in 1974 inspired The Shining, and argued that his influential novel can be understood as “western” story, one bound up in geographic isolation, violent masculinity, alcoholism, criminal land-stealing, and the haunting erasure of indigenous inhabitants.