11/22/63

According to King, the idea for the novel first came to him in 1971,[12] before the release of his first novel, Carrie (1974). He was going to title it Split Track. However, he felt a historical novel required more research than he was willing to do at the time and greater literary talent than he possessed.[10] Like his novel Under the Dome (2009), he abandoned the project, returning to the story later in life.[13]

King first talked publicly about the idea in Marvel Spotlight issue The Dark Tower (January 27, 2007), prior to the beginning of the ongoing comic book adaptation of King's Dark Tower series. In a piece in the magazine titled "An Open Letter from Stephen King", he writes about possible original ideas for comics:

I'd like to tell a time-travel story where this guy finds a diner that connects to 1958... you always go back to the same day. So one day he goes back and just stays. Leaves his 2007 life behind. His goal? To get up to November 22, 1963, and stop Lee Harvey Oswald. He does, and he's convinced he's just FIXED THE WORLD. But when he goes back to '07, the world's a nuclear slag-heap. Not good to fool with Father Time. So then he has to go back again and stop himself..... only he's taken on a fatal dose of radiation, so it's a race against time.[14]

Commenting on the book as historical fiction, King said: "This might be a book where we really have a chance to get an audience who's not my ordinary audience. Instead of people who read horror stories, people who read The Help or People of the Book might like this book".[10]

King and longtime researcher Russ Dorr prepared for the novel by reading many historical documents and newspaper archives from the period, looking at clothing and appliance ads, sports scores, and television listings.[10] The book contains detailed minutiae such as the 1958 price of a pint of root beer (10 cents) or a haircut (40 cents). King and Dorr traveled to Dallas, where they visited Oswald's apartment building (now a private residence), found the home of Gen. Edwin Walker (a target of an assassination attempt by Oswald), and had a private tour of the Sixth Floor Museum in the Texas School Book Depository.[10] King studied various conspiracy theories, ultimately coming to the conclusion that Oswald acted alone.[10] King met with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, an assistant to Lyndon B. Johnson and the author of books about several presidents, and used some of her ideas of worst-case political scenarios that might occur in the absence of Kennedy's assassination.[10]

The trade hardcover edition features a dust jacket that is a faux newspaper front page, with the front of the jacket featuring an article recounting the real historical event of Kennedy's assassination, and the back featuring an alternative history article speaking of the event as just a failed assassination attempt that Kennedy survives unscathed. The newspaper headlines were written by Stephen King.[15] In addition to the regular trade edition, Scribner produced a signed limited edition of 1,000 copies, 850 of which were made available for sale beginning on November 8, 2011 (ISBN 978-1-4516-6385-3).[16] This edition features a different dust jacket, exclusive chapter-heading photos, and a DVD. Due to a website problem on November 8, most copies remained unsold and a drawing ran from November 10 to 11 to sell the remaining copies.[17]

There was also a limited edition of 700 published in the United Kingdom. It was a slipcased hardcover with deluxe binding, photographic endpapers, and a facsimile signature, and included a DVD.[18]

On July 24, 2012, Gallery Books published a trade paperback edition of the novel (ISBN 978-1451627299), which contains an additional "book club kit", featuring an interview with Stephen King about 11/22/63, a set of discussion questions, and a period playlist with King's commentary and recipes.[19]

Jake Epping is a recently divorced high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, earning extra money teaching a GED class. Epping gives an assignment to his adult students, asking them to write about a day that changed their lives. One of the students, a janitor named Harry Dunning, submits an assignment describing the night his alcoholic father murdered his mother and siblings with a hammer and injured Harry, causing him to have a permanent brain injury; the story emotionally affects Jake, and the two become friends after Harry earns his GED.

Two years later, in June 2011, Jake stops by a local diner and speaks with the proprietor, Al Templeton, who asks Jake to meet him at his diner the next day. When Jake arrives, he is shocked to see that Al seems to have aged years since the previous day. Al explains that he is dying and that his appearance is attributable to his having time traveled and lived for years in the past. Al's method of time travel is a time portal he discovered in his diner's pantry, which he used to transport himself to 1958. Doubting Al's story at first, Jake travels through the portal, where he encounters an addled wino whom Al has dubbed the "Yellow Card Man" due to the color of a card on the man's hat. Jake spends an hour in 1958 before returning to the present, after which Al explains that he's figured out the basics of how the portal functions:

• Every journey through the portal transports the traveler to September 9, 1958, at 11:58 a.m.
• No matter how long someone stays in the past—hours, days, weeks, or years—only two minutes have elapsed when they return to 2011.
• Past events can be changed; however, subsequent use of the portal "resets" the timeline and nullifies all changes made on the previous excursion.
• The "obdurate" past throws up obstacles to prevent history from being changed. Such resistance is proportional to the magnitude of the change.

Al reveals that after discovering the portal, he'd concocted a plan to change the past by preventing John F. Kennedy's assassination, hoping that doing so would change history for the better, as he attributed many bad things that happened in the world to events that would not have occurred had JFK lived. He spent four years in the past after entering the portal the previous night, traveling to Dallas, Texas, to track Lee Harvey Oswald, plotting to kill the would-be assassin during his attempted murder of General Edwin Walker. His delay was due to the fact that he wanted to be absolutely sure that Oswald was a killer and would act alone. Al developed cancer, so he had to give up his mission, knowing he would not live long enough to complete it. He recruits a reluctant Jake to complete the task instead.

As an experiment, Jake travels back to 1958 to Derry, Maine, to save Harry's family, who will be killed by his father, Frank Dunning, on Halloween night. Despite many obstacles, he succeeds in saving all but one of Harry's siblings, then returns to 2011 hopeful he improved Harry's life, only to learn his actions led to Harry dying in Vietnam. While Jake is still trying to process this information, Al commits suicide, forcing Jake to act immediately, before the death becomes known and the diner sealed.

With no preparation, Jake re-enters the portal and discovers that the "Yellow Card Man" has cut his own throat, and the yellow card is now black. He ignores it and goes to Derry to kill Frank ahead of Frank's murderous rampage. After resolving one of Al's other missions—preventing a hunter from accidentally shooting a little girl—Jake makes his way, first to Florida, then to the small Dallas-area town of Jodie to wait for Oswald's arrival. Jake spends years establishing his identity in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but comes to suspect history "harmonizes"—he keeps coming into contact with people of the same name, with similar events. He suspects saving one life may result in another person dying in their stead, for example. While in Dallas, he meets librarian Sadie Dunhill; the two begin a relationship. Their relationship becomes strained as Sadie is suspicious of Jake's use of anachronistic colloquialisms and song lyrics. However, Jake rescues her from a near-fatal overdose as well as an assault by her ex-husband Johnny Clayton. After successfully predicting the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he eventually tells her he is from the future.

Before this, Jake actively stalks Oswald, renting apartments near those of the Oswalds. He begins to wonder if Oswald's only friend in Dallas, George de Mohrenschildt, may somehow be involved in the assassination, and thus hesitates to kill Oswald ahead of time. He thinks de Mohrenschildt is a CIA resource who is supposed to keep an eye on Oswald, but may also be egging Oswald on to kill first General Walker, then JFK. Jake resolves to wait until the Walker attempted assassination before killing Oswald. However, he is unable to learn certain facts and is prevented from accessing several opportunities to kill Oswald.

Finally, November 22, 1963, arrives. Jake reaches Oswald's sniper's nest at the Texas School Book Depository mere moments before Kennedy's motorcade drives through Dealey Plaza. Nevertheless, he successfully prevents Oswald from shooting Kennedy. In a rage, Oswald fires at Jake. The shot misses and mortally wounds Sadie, now Jake's fiancée, who had come to help him. The noise of the confrontation draws the attention of the United States Secret Service and police, who fire through the window and kill Oswald. Sadie dies in Jake's arms.

Jake immediately becomes a national hero and is personally thanked by President Kennedy and his wife. Distraught over Sadie's death, Jake resolves to return to 2011 and back to 1958 in order to repeat his journey and save both Sadie and Kennedy. The FBI arranges Jake's disappearance from the public eye and helps him leave Dallas by bus late on the night of November 22. After he returns to New England, he learns that on November 25 a massive earthquake in Los Angeles has killed thousands. Jake realizes that it is a direct result of his actions.

When he gets to the portal, the Yellow Card Man has been replaced by Zack Lang, a respectable-looking man with a Green Card. Zack explains that traveling through the portal does not change the past, but creates multiple "time strings," stretching the bonds of reality. Guarding it is difficult because the men dispatched to do so must keep myriad realities in their minds at all times (the cards function as a form of radiation detector: a green card indicates the agent is healthy, but as they deteriorate, the card changes to yellow, then to orange, and finally to black). The process is so stressful that it drives most agents to mental illness, alcoholism, and eventually suicide, like Kyle, the previous agent (Kyle was actually the alcoholic "Yellow Card Man" from the beginning of the story). Zack begs Jake to set things right again, or reality itself will cease to exist. He instructs Jake to return to 2011 and witness the damage his interference has caused history.

When Jake steps back through the portal, he sees Lisbon Falls is now in ruins, partially because Vermont Yankee "went China Syndrome" in 1999, spreading radiation across New England and southern Quebec. Furthermore, there continue to be frequent, massive earthquakes everywhere due to the interference in history. Jake meets a familiar-looking man who turns out to be Harry Dunning, whose life he saved long ago. No longer a janitor with a brain injury, he is a Vietnam vet who was paralyzed during the war and now uses a wheelchair. Harry tells Jake a concise and disturbing history of the world between 1963 and 2011. John F. Kennedy went on to narrowly win a second term but was unable to bring about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as Lyndon B. Johnson had. This led to increased racial tensions and riots in the U.S., especially after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (in Chicago by FBI Agent Dwight Holly in this timeline). Kennedy also refused to commit to action in Vietnam outside of stationing U.S. soldiers in Saigon, but his successor, George Wallace, reversed this course and used nuclear weapons on Hanoi in response to the fall of Saigon in 1967. This and other incidents led to more instability all over the world, including frequent use of nuclear weapons by terrorists and a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan in the early 1970s. The Soviet Union experiences a total financial collapse in the early 1980s.

Jake quickly returns to 1958 and finds Zack much worse for wear. He tells Jake he must now go back to 2011 (since all of Jake's changes are now undone) and ensure the portal is closed. Instead, Jake goes to a hotel and contemplates returning to Texas and Sadie. Ultimately, he returns to his own time, having made no major changes this time. Looking up old records on the Internet, Jake learns that Sadie survived the attack by her ex-husband, which she had only survived before by his rescuing her; this time with the assistance of Deacon and Ellen Dockerty, another mutual friend.

Jake goes back to Jodie, where Sadie is in her 80s and is being honored by the town with a celebration. In this timeline, Sadie has no memory of Jake, but she experiences deja vu when he speaks to her. The two share a dance.

The reviews for 11/22/63 have been generally positive, with The New York Times selecting the novel as one of its top five fiction books of the year[21] and the Las Vegas Review-Journal calling it King's "best novel in more than a decade".[22] The review aggregate site Metacritic judged 30 out of 36 reviews as positive, with four mixed and two negative.[23] Book Marks reported 46% of critics gave the book a "rave" review, while 31% and 8% expressed "positive" and "mixed" impressions.[24] Currently on social cataloging website Goodreads the book has a score of 4.31/5 from 385,526 ratings.[25]

NPR book critic Alan Cheuse found no fault with the structure, commenting: "I wouldn't have [King] change a single page."[26] USA Today gave the novel four out of four stars, noting the novel retains the suspenseful tension of King's earlier works but is not of the same genre. "[The novel] is not typical Stephen King."[27] Janet Maslin of The New York Times also commented on the genre change and pacing but felt the writer has built the narrative tightly enough for the reader to suspend disbelief. "The pages of '11/22/63' fly by, filled with immediacy, pathos and suspense. It takes great brazenness to go anywhere near this subject matter. But it takes great skill to make this story even remotely credible. Mr. King makes it all look easy, which is surely his book's fanciest trick."[28] The review in the Houston Chronicle called the novel "one of King's best books in a long time" but "overlong", noting: "As is usually the case with King's longer books, there's a lot of self-indulgent fat in 11/22/63 that could have been trimmed."[29] The review in the Bangor Daily News commented that the novel "[is] another winner",[30] but provided no critical review of the plot construction. Lev Grossman, in reviewing the novel for Time, called the novel "the work of a master craftsman" but commented that "the wires go slack from time to time" and the book wanders from genre to genre, particularly in the middle.[31] More pointedly, Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin called the novel "a misguided effort in story and writing"; Ulin's primary criticism is the conceit of the story, which requires the reader to follow two plotlines simultaneously – historical fiction built upon the Kennedy assassination as well as the tale of a time traveling English teacher – which adds a page load to the novel that Ulin found excessive.[32]

On September 22, 2014, it was announced that a TV series based on the novel was picked up by Hulu.[34] James Franco was chosen to star as the character of Jake Epping.[35] The series premiered on President's Day, February 15, 2016, and was met with mostly positive reviews.[36]

• John F. Kennedy assassination in popular culture
• "Profile in Silver": The Twilight Zone episode with similar plot.
• Timescape (1980) novel by Gregory Benford

Wikiquote has quotations related to: 11/22/63

• A Stephen King Thriller: What Motivated Oswald?: Stephen King's letter to the editor regarding the politics and motivations of Lee Harvey Oswald, published on December 1, 2011, in The New York Times