a literary kingmaker

The new issue of the iconoclastic The Agonist is out, and in it for the first time, I got caught up with the Stephen King controversy. I had seen his name trending, and I know he is vocal on twitter, blocked by the president, etc., but there is too much of this stuff to follow it all. Anyway, in "The Doomed Equality Movement" by Daniel N. Davidson, I read

The author Stephen King has lately been excoriated for saying that he “would never consider diversity in matters of art, only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong.” For that he was accused of exercising white privilege, being an opponent of affirmative action, and promoting systemic bias. Rather, his critics insist, one should judge by the criterion of diversity–which would mean the division of all honors so that all self-identifying groups get theirs.  

I do not know if any current "equality movement" will fail or succeed, but the passage reminded me of Stephen King's lament, expressed somewhere in his famous On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. This memoir on the writing life is likely the only King that those of us who don't read horror have read, and in it, he expressed the wish that he were better recognized as a genuine literary talent—a "sentence maker" as we could say. In the passage I'm thinking of, he is also considering his fellow novelist-musician Amy Tan, and expressing dismay that their bestselling novels are never recognized as having literary qualities, in particular he notes they are not recognized for "the language." I am recalling this from memory, and I'm sorry I don't have the passage handy, but we've come a long way—or there's been a long fall?—when a figure such as Stephen King can be recognized and "excoriated" for being a kingmaker in the world of "high brow" art. Where is the Nobel committee? Or Joyce scribbling in his grave? Is Stephen King's opinion on "matters of art" supposed to matter at all? Why isn't Thomas Pynchon on twitter? And, no, I do not mean to imply that King is overrated in the genres he's working in—the horror novel and the tweet.