In 1971, eight years after the JFK assassination, Stephen King started writing a book called Split Track. Recently hired as an English teacher at Hampden Academy, he had just published a short story called “I Am the Doorway”, almost sold a novel called Getting It On to Bill Thompson at Doubleday, and he was constantly sucking up ideas. As he recalls, “It was 1971 and I was in the teachers’ room and people were talking about the Kennedy assassination. The 22nd would roll around and people would talk and write about the assassination and stuff. I guess somebody must have said, ‘What would it have been like if Kennedy had lived?’ And I thought to myself, ‘I’d love to write a story about that.’ ”

Newly married, with a one-and-a-half year old daughter at home, barely three months into his first teaching job, he was overwhelmed by the amount of research involved and gave up after writing 14 single-spaced pages. 36 years later, in the January, 27 issue of Marvel Spotlight, King wrote about a comic he was considering that told the story of a guy who travels through a time portal in the back of a diner to stop the Kennedy assassination, but changing history turns the present day into a radioactive wasteland and he has to go back again and stop himself from stopping Oswald. King thought this story might reach “an audience who’s not my ordinary audience. Instead of people who read horror stories, people who read The Help or People of the Book might like this book.” Six months later, King’s researcher, Russell Dorr, went to work on the Kennedy assassination in preparation for King’s next book. And, in January, 2009, 38 years after first getting the idea, King began typing the beginning of what would become 11/22/63. And he was right. It would turn out to be his biggest bestseller in over a decade.

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