page_title: Les Whitten
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Les Whitten / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Stephen King, American author best known for his enormously popular horror novels. King was the 2003 recipient of The National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Taken at the 2007 New York Comicon.
context_page_description: Les Whitten was an American investigative reporter at the Washington Merry-Go-Round under Jack Anderson, as well as translator of French poetry by Baudelaire and influential novelist of Horror and Science Fiction books.
context_section_description: In 1978, Jack Anderson called Whitten "the best reporter in the country" and said that Whitten had worked on nearly all stories for a decade at the Washington Merry-Go-Round.  New York Times journalist Tom Buckley once called him Jack Anderson's "senior ferret".
  The Weekly Standard credits Whitten for having "reinvented Horror and Science Fiction" book genres.  The newspaper relates that the vampire horror story The Progeny of the Adder (1965) influenced the 1970s television series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which in turn influenced the 1990s television series The X-Files.  Stephen King listed it among essential horror novels in his non-fiction book Danse Macabre.
caption: Whitten's The Progeny of the Adder (1965) appears on Stephen King's list of essential horror novels in his non-fiction book Danse Macabre (here, King in 2007)
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