The Stand: Complete and Uncut Edition

The Stand: Complete and Uncut Edition by Stephen King is the complete and definitive version of the novel. It was published in 1990 by Doubleday, who had published the original. It includes almost all of the 400 pages which King personally removed from the first draft manuscript - barring some which King considered best left excised - and updates pop cultural references which had become obsolete in the intervening 12 years. In the preface, King describes it as being "as the author originally intended for it to roll out of the showroom."

Very little new material was added, although an epilogue featuring Randall Flagg is believed to be wholly invented for this edition. Also, artist Bernie Wrightson created 12 original pen-and-ink illustrations.

The original version had never hit the New York Times Fiction Best Seller list, perhaps in part because at the time it was released in 1978, a newspaper strike meant there was no such list being tallied or published. The Complete and Uncut Edition went to #1 for four out of five weeks in May and June 1990, and Publisher's Weekly counted it as #7 for the year, with King's new anthology of four novellas, Four Past Midnight, being in the #2 spot.

The Complete and Uncut Version entirely supplanted the original, and it is upon this version which all subsequent adaptations are based. It can also accurately be said it is this version which in 1998 ranked #55 on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century, in 2003 at #53 on the BBC's "The Big Read" poll, and in 2018 as #24 on PBS' "The Great American Read." It has also appeared on numerous lists of best SF/fantasy novels and best novels of the 20th century.

Background

 * [See The Stand (1978 novel) for more information]

When The Stand was first published in 1978, Stephen King was a promising young popular novel author. Over the next five years, he would become something more.

His star was already on the rise as an author. The Stand was his fourth published novel, and his fifth, The Dead Zone, about a man who gains psychic powers from a car accident and tracks down both a serial killer and a murderous politician, was his first to be the #1 New York Times Fiction Best Seller. For the next two decades, King books were almost guaranteed to reach the top spot on that list, but his star would continue to rise to make him more than simply another Tom Clancy or Danielle Steele or Dean R. Koontz.

His first novel Carrie, published in 1974, had already been adapted into an Oscar-nominated 1976 film of the same title by acclaimed director Brian DePalma. In 1980, the legendary director Stanley Kubrick adapted his third novel, The Shining, into a classic film starring Jack Nicholson, and in 1983, another critical darling director, David Cronenberg, adapted The Dead Zone into a film starring Christopher Walken and Martin Sheen. He was no longer just another pop fiction writer. He was a pop fiction writer who inspired the most Serious Artistic Film Makers.

(Ironically, although it lent him a great deal of artistic cachet, while King considered Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining one of the greatest horror films of all time, he considered it a horrible adaptation of his novel, and in 1997, just three years after he executive produced the first The Stand miniseries, he would closely oversee a TV miniseries remake of The Shining more faithful to his original.)

On top of these commercial and critical bona fides, King himself had become a celebrity on a level not seen since his hero Ray Bradbury, if indeed Bradbury had ever reached this level of notoriety and recognition. In 1981, King had a cameo in the George A. Romero film Knightriders starring Ed Harris, and the following year, King starred in an entire segment of Romero's film Creepshow, for which King wrote the screenplay, an homage to the EC horror comics which had inspired both Romero and King, in which King played a hapless farmer whose encounter with an alien meteor ruins him. Further appearances in films - both in cameos and documentaries - made King's name household and his face recognizable, even to people with little to no interest in the SF/fantasy or horror genres.

In a sort of stardom cliché, with the celebrity came the abuse of alcohol and drugs. King's struggles had already begun in 1973 with the sale of Carrie. His mother, Nellie Ruth King, died shortly after Christmas of that year, before Carrie was published. The Shining was already a thinly veiled metaphor for his personal addictions. He would later claim to have no memory of writing his 1981 best seller Cujo, about a good dog driven mad by rabies, nor his 1987 novel The Tommyknockers, about an alien force which takes over the minds of the residents of a small Maine town except for a man in recovery from alcoholism.

In the late 1980s, King's wife Tabitha and several other friends staged an intervention, telling King what he had apparently been telling himself since he had begun down that road. The character of Larry Underwood in The Stand can thus accurately be described as both semi-autobiographical and oddly prescient for King himself.

With his newfound sobriety came a newfound clear-headedness. King had never considered The Stand one of his own favorite works, but it was a clear fan favorite. Thus, although his hardback publisher had been Viking Press since The Dead Zone, he returned to Doubleday to ask to release an uncut version. As his 1986 novel It had been over 1100 pages long and still a #1 best seller, Doubleday agreed, and the definitive version of what many consider his masterpiece was finally released in the spring of 1990.

It is this version to which this Wiki primarily devotes itself.

Chapters

 * ''[See List of Chapters in Novel for complete list]