Icon Analysis

The three pop culture icons I choose to analyze are Anne Rice, Stephen King and Stephenie Meyer. These three authors have all played a key role in popular culture in the last few decades and have made reading books cool again. No one can deny the fact that these authors have had an influential part in bringing a culture of young people to the wonderful world of the written word. All three have managed to do this by writing material that is appealing to most readers both young and old. They weave intricate stories that include, mystery, a little bit of romance, and most of all an element of horror. These types of stories have been appealing to audiences for generations and is proven to catch the imaginations of readers of all ages.

Anne Rice

Anne Rice is the author of "Interview with the Vampire", "Queen of the Damned" and several dozen other novels. She has a career of writing that has spanned decades and is universally recognized as being the author to have breathed new life into the vampire genre. She started her career in 1976 when "Interview with the vampire" was published and continues to write to this day. She has been said to have been solely responsible for changing the way we as a culture look at the vampire genre because in her stories, she makes you sympathize with the vampire, and not the victim as is the case in most vampire stories. She also has written novels other than horror stories, including a series of romance (or erotica) novels and also novels that deal with religion. She has recently started a series of books about a werewolf called "The Wolf Gift", appealing to a whole new audience that may not have had any interest in her vampire stories.


Stephen King
Stephen King is the author of such iconic novels as "It", "Carrie", and "The Shining". Like Anne Rice, he has a career that spans decades and is considered to be a huge influence of many new, young authors. His career started in 1973 with the novel "Carrie". Since then, he has written over 50 novels and won several awards including The Hugo Award, The Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Several of his novels have been made into movies and mini-series and his books have sold over 350 million copies worldwide. While his stories deal mostly in mystery or horror, there is an underlying message of morals that Mr. King likes to add to his main characters. This is what essentially makes his works so popular and influential. Even though his stories are popularized as "horror" they carry a message that everyone can relate to, be it breaking up with your significant other, dealing with the loss of a loved one, or facing one's "demons".


Stephenie Meyer

Stephenie Meyer is the author of the wildly popular "Twilight" series of novels. Her career started in 2005 with the publication of "Twilight", which was then followed by "New Moon" in 2006, and then "Eclipse" in 2007. She finished up the series with 2008's "Breaking Dawn". Ms. Meyer has also written another book titled "The Host" also in 2008 and a short story of hers was published in 2009 titled "Hell on Earth". While she has been criticized by other authors (among them Stephen King), she has a massive following of young readers, and while you may not appreciate her style of writing, or even her subject matter, you can't argue the influence she has had on young readers in the past few years. Her books are so popular, that almost everything she has published has been made into films. What most people don't realize is that her stories are actually inspired by her love of the literary classics. She has said that "Twilight" was actually inspired by Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice and "New Moon" was inspired by Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. 

All three of these icons are influential to me both in a personal and a professional way. Growing up I read both Stephen King's and Anne Rice's books and the characters in these stories feel, in a way,  like friends to me. Like most people, I felt alienated when I was a teen and these stories helped me cope with what I was going through. On a professional level, by reading so much as a teen and a young adult, I was able to increase my knowledge as there were things referred to the books that I knew nothing about, especially Anne Rice's novels. Her stories have a lot of history references and I credit her for my love of all things Egyptian and Roman. She also gave me the inspiration to research because she does such extensive research for her novels so that any historical references she makes are accurate.