I was glad to receive this response to my recent post comparing Walter Scott to Stephen King:
Scott was no great stylist, but he was vastly more popular and influential in his own time than any novelist is today. Scott’s stories caught the imagination of whole continents, whereas the most one can say about King is that he’s very popular for a writer, and even he can’t match the likes of Dr. Atkins in sales of individual books. I would suggest that the nearest analog to Scott in today’s world would be George Lucas or Stephen Spielberg. Both have created other worlds in which a good