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Anthony Samuel Magistrale is a professor in English at the University of Vermont since 1983.[1] He received a B.A. in 1974 from Allegheny College, and from the University of Pittsburgh an M.A. in 1976 and a PhD in 1981.[2] He has written several books about Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe.[3]
In 2000 King employed Magistrale as a research assistant.[4]
King sets many of his stories in the fictional town of Derry, Maine.[5] Many writers report that King told Magistrale that Derry is based heavily on Bangor, Maine, his home town.
He is also a poet. In 2011, he received Literary Laundry's Award of Distinction for his poem "Dora Maar".[6]
As an expert on King's work he has been called upon to provide commentary tracks when movies based on King's work are released on video.[7] He contributed audio commentary when Maximum Overdrive was released on Blu-ray in 2018.
In a 2002 interview with Tony Magistrale, the author spun a yarn about an urban legend that the sewer system in Bangor was so hastily built in the 1930s—while the WPA was throwing money at public works projects—that the town's engineers "lost track of what they were building under there." As a result, King says, nobody has a truly reliable map of the Bangor sewer system and "it's easy to get lost down there." True or not, it's a good setup for a horror story. Bill Denbrough essentially repeats this urban legend in IT, right before he and his friends embark on their underworld journey into Pennywise's labyrinth.
NEW: Audio Commentary with Writer Tony Magistrale, Author of Hollywood's Steven King.
"Dora Maar" at the Literary Laundry website.