28 pages • 56 minutes read
Stephen KingThe Last Rung on the Ladder
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Stephen King
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine, in 1947, and was primarily raised by his mother. He, his mother, and his brother, David, moved to Indiana and then Connecticut before returning to Maine to live with his maternal grandparents. He attended the University of Maine at Orono, where he wrote for his school newspaper and met his future wife, Tabitha. After they graduated, he and Tabitha survived on a combination of his earnings from an industrial laundry company, her savings, and the money he made from selling short stories. Many of the stories he wrote during this time were collected in Night Shift, the 1978 anthology in which “The Last Rung on the Ladder” appears.
In 1971, King began teaching English at a high school in Maine, but he continued to write in his spare time. Carrie, his first novel, was published in 1974 and was so successful that he was able to leave teaching and write full-time. He has since published nearly 200 short stories and over 70 fiction and nonfiction books, including several that were made into iconic movies, such as The Shining, It, and Misery. His awards include the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to the American Letters and the 2014 National Medal of Arts. He and Tabitha have three children and four grandchildren, and they split their time between Maine and Florida.
Most of King’s work is in the horror genre, but he has also explored fantasy (The Dark Tower series, The Green Mile, and Eyes of the Dragon), detective fiction (Bill Hodges trilogy), and writing advice (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft). “The Last Rung on the Ladder,” a realistic exploration of family dynamics, is one of King’s few stories with no fantastical or horror elements, except perhaps the horror of someone losing a loved one and knowing they might have been able to prevent it.
Societal Context: US Agriculture and Economics in the 1970s
Published in 1978, the text is influenced by two aspects of American society from this time: the agricultural boom of the 1970s and the 1973-75 economic recession.
The early 1970s were beneficial to farmers. The Soviet Union experienced a great drought and crop failure in 1971-72, and the United States brokered a large-scale deal to sell them grain, which raised the amount that farmers could charge for their grain. At the same time, the US government lowered the requirement on how much farmland had to be set aside for conservation, allowing for much more cultivation. The result was a record-high income for American farmers. By the late 1970s, however, grain prices returned to normal, and cracks were appearing in the success of the agricultural system, foreshadowing the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. Although Larry’s family is not wealthy, their farm is described as successful, “three hundred acres of flat, rich land” (295), and the idyllic nature of the farm in the flashback scene reflects the prosperous nature of agriculture in the early ’70s. Two years after the mother dies, the father loses the farm, in keeping with the trouble that was coming to many small farmers in the late ’70s.
While farmers were doing well in the early 1970s, the broader US economy was not. In 1973, Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) placed an embargo on the United States, as well as several other countries, in retaliation for their support of the Israeli military. Oil prices quadrupled, which in turn placed great pressure on consumers, contributed to rising inflation, and triggered a stock market crash. The 1973-75 recession, a period of economic stagnation that affected most of the Western world, lasted for 16 months and ended the post-World War II financial boom. Larry’s obsession with economic success as an adult reflects the unease that many felt even after the economy had started to recover.
Related Titles
By Stephen King
