Stephen King, whose first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974, the year before the last U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, is the first hugely popular writer of the TV generation. Images from that war Hearts in Atlantis (1999) is a collection of two novellas and three short stories by Stephen King, all connected to one another by recurring characters and taking place in roughly chronological order. The stories are about the baby boomer generation, specifically King's view that this generation (to which he belongs) failed to live up to its promise and ideals. Significantly, the opening epigraph of the collection is the Peter Fonda line from the end of Easy Rider: "We blew it." All of the stories are about baby boomers, and in all of them the members of that generation fail profoundly, or are paying the costs of some profound failure on their part.