Diane Johnson is the novelist Stanley Kubrick phoned when he needed The Shining taken apart — and the reason he phoned her matters: she had already written a horror novel of her own, a quiet, airless masterpiece of paranoia called The Shadow Knows, and Kubrick recognised a fellow dismantler when he read one. Three people made The Shining in three different jobs. Stephen King wrote the novel. Stanley Kubrick directed the film. Diane Johnson — professor of English, biographer of Dashiell Hammett, future National Book Award finalist — co-wrote the screenplay, with Kubrick. Hers is the name the story forgets. Not here.
Moline, Three Campuses and a Professorship
Diane Lain Johnson was born on 28 April 1934 in Moline, Illinois, the daughter of Dolph Lain and Frances (Elder) Lain. Her education came in three stages, and the reference record is clear about each — a widely copied one-line version gets it wrong. She attended Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, from 1951 to 1953. Her B.A. is from the University of Utah, in 1957 — not from Stephens. Her M.A. (1966) and her Ph.D. in English (1968) are from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was a Woodrow Wilson fellow. In 1968, aged thirty-four, she became a professor of English at the University of California, Davis, beginning as assistant professor and rising to full professor, a post she held until 1987. Davis is where she taught. UCLA is where she took the degrees. Keep those two facts in their separate boxes and you are already ahead of most of the internet.
Her private architecture, briefly: she married B. Lamar Johnson Jr. in July 1953, and the four children of that marriage — Kevin, Darcy, Amanda and Simon — are hers. The marriage ended in divorce. In May 1968 she married John Frederic Murray, a professor of medicine — the physician husband is the second one. Murray died in March 2020, of Covid-19, in a French hospital, by Johnson’s own account. For the last twenty years she has lived in Paris, with summers in San Francisco — “I live in the center of Paris, a hundred yards from the Seine,” she wrote in 2021.
The Novelist Before the Phone Call
Johnson’s first novel, Fair Game, appeared in 1965, as she was completing the Ph.D., and established the pattern of her California fiction: worldly, satiric novels about contemporary women in crisis. Loving Hands at Home (1968) follows a woman who leaves her Mormon husband and his family and fails to succeed on her own; Burning (1971) satirises the Southern California way of life. Lesser Lives (1972/73) turned her to biography — a life of Mary Ellen Meredith, wife of the novelist George Meredith.
Then, in January 1974, Knopf published The Shadow Knows — the hinge of this whole page. It is a psychological horror novel: not a ghost story, and nothing supernatural happens in it. Its narrator is a young divorced woman, a mother of four living in Sacramento and working on a graduate degree, who becomes convinced she is marked for violence. Her door is hacked with an axe. A strangled cat is found outside her apartment. Disturbing phone calls arrive daily. And she cannot be sure — this is the engine of the book — whether she is being stalked, or imagining it. Johnson was thirty-nine. The novel is a machine built out of uncertain perception: the social surface of a life, rotting from underneath.
The Kubrick Call and the Making of The Shining
In late 1976, while Johnson was visiting England, Stanley Kubrick telephoned her. He had been impressed by The Shadow Knows — by its taut psychological suspense and its depiction of a person dealing with irrational occurrences — and he wanted to discuss writing the screenplay for The Shining. She was, at the time, a professor at UC Davis teaching Victorian literature; accounts of the Kubrick call also place her teaching a seminar on Gothic novels. Kubrick had hired, in other words, not a genre screenwriter but a teacher of Gothic literature who had written a novel of irrational menace.
The credit of record on The Shining (1980) is “Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson,” based on the 1977 novel by Stephen King. The film was released in the United States on 23 May 1980; Johnson was forty-six. Their working method is the stuff of screenwriting legend: she and Kubrick each separately deconstructed King’s novel into its essential scenes, compared their lists, and winnowed them down to roughly a hundred scenes, working from narrative units — Johnson tearing exposition and dialogue from a paperback copy and filing the pieces in envelopes labelled by scene: “#1 The Arrival,” and so on. Their declared preoccupations for the adaptation were 18th- and 19th-century Gothic novels, Freud’s essay on the uncanny, Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (1976) and Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel” (1898). A professor’s reading list, applied to a bestseller, inside a grand hotel where Jack Nicholson‘s Jack Torrance and Shelley Duvall‘s Wendy would play out the result.
Kubrick had rejected King’s own draft screenplay as too literal an adaptation before writing with Johnson — Johnson was Kubrick’s collaborator, never King’s. And King disliked the finished film, calling it cold and, in his long-repeated formulation, “a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it” — a verdict from his later interviews, not a 1980 review. He later wrote the 1997 television miniseries version himself, and eventually continued the story in his own sequel, Doctor Sleep. None of that diminishes the film Johnson co-wrote; it defines the terms on which she wrote it — building Jack Torrance‘s descent to be plausible, motivated and completely scary.
The Career Around the Hotel
The Shining was one credit in a major literary career, and the career kept moving. Lying Low (1978) chronicled four days in the lives of three markedly different women. The non-fiction shelf grew: Terrorists and Novelists (1982), a collection of literary portraits, reviews and essays, and Dashiell Hammett: A Life (1983), an authorised biography written with the authorisation and help of Lillian Hellman, Hammett’s partner — a biography the scholarly record treats as unlikely to be superseded. Hammett’s biographer is the same writer Kubrick hired for Gothic dread — the noir and the Gothic are neighbouring rooms, and Johnson held keys to both.
Persian Nights (1987), set in Iran on the eve of the 1979 revolution and drawn from three months she had spent in Iran in 1978 with her husband under a medical-school exchange programme, made her a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 — finalist, not winner; the distinction is the job. In the same period she received the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living stipend from the American Academy of Arts and Letters — a fellowship to write, not a prize for a single book. Health and Happiness (1990), set in San Francisco inside a large hospital complex, drew on her physician husband’s world. She has been a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books since the mid-1970s, and has written essays and reviews for the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post throughout.
The France Trilogy and the Long Career
In her sixties, Johnson reinvented herself as the chronicler of Americans in France. Le Divorce (1997) — published when she was sixty-three — became a national bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the winner of the California Book Award gold medal for fiction. Le Mariage (2000) and L’Affaire (2003) completed the trilogy — comedies of manners about American heroines colliding with French law, money, marriage and family. The 2003 film of Le Divorce, directed by James Ivory and starring Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts, credits Johnson as the novel’s author — not its screenwriter. Her screenplay credit of record remains The Shining.
The later work kept coming: Lulu in Marrakech (2008); the memoir Flyover Lives (2014), about her Midwestern forebears and Moline childhood; and Lorna Mott Comes Home (2021) — Kirkus, in its interview with her, counted it her 11th novel — in which an American woman leaves her French husband and returns to San Francisco and her grown children: the France story run in reverse, published when she was eighty-seven. Her verified awards, stated exactly: National Book Award finalist for Le Divorce; California Book Award gold medal for fiction, for Le Divorce; Pulitzer Prize finalist for Persian Nights; a Guggenheim fellowship in 1977–78; and the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1979.
Signatures and Habits
The outline is the method, and Kubrick recognised his own. Johnson told her interviewer Larry McCaffery that what screenwriting taught her was “mostly about outlining, about the shorthand form of manipulating the narrative materials” — she had already made “quite careful outlines of The Shadow Knows,” and found that “Stanley Kubrick very much works this way. He convinced me how valuable it is to work this way.” Her working rule for the film, in her later description of the approach, was that it “must be plausible, use no cheap tricks, have no holes in the plot, no failures of motivation… and it must be completely scary.” That is a Gothic professor’s rule, and the film obeys it.
The deeper signature is continuity. Johnson’s instrument across both careers is precise, Jamesian social observation — the San Francisco Chronicle‘s blurb line runs, “if one were to cross Jane Austen and Henry James, the result would be Diane Johnson” — applied in California satire and the France comedies, and inverted in The Shadow Knows and The Shining, where the social surface (a marriage, a family, a grand hotel) is exactly what rots. She writes from inside the life she examines — Iran, the hospital world, the Paris–San Francisco split were all hers first. Her stated subject, in her own words, never changed: “I’m still writing about Americans for Americans.” Manners novelist, Gothic dismantler, Hammett’s biographer — one writer, one method, many rooms.
Why Diane Johnson Matters
To a horror wiki, she matters first because she co-wrote the most analysed horror film ever made, and the screenplay bears two names. A culture that says “Kubrick’s The Shining” and stops there repeats an erasure this page exists to correct. She matters second because she came to that film as a horror novelist in her own right — The Shadow Knows is the documented reason Kubrick called. And she matters third as the bridge between the Gothic tradition and modern screen horror: a Victorian-literature professor, hired precisely for that expertise, applying 18th- and 19th-century Gothic machinery and Freud’s uncanny to a Stephen King bestseller — no other figure connects the classroom Gothic canon to the Overlook Hotel in one documented career step. The rest of the career is the context that makes the credit legible: a major American author before, during and after the hotel. Start the rewatch with Danny Torrance — the boy at the centre of the machinery she and Kubrick built — and watch what the envelopes became.
Trivia
- By one well-established account of their early conversations, Kubrick had at one point considered adapting The Shadow Knows itself before settling on Johnson as his Shining co-writer.
- Her papers record a 1953 guest editorship at Mademoiselle, in the cohort made famous by Sylvia Plath.
- The physician husband in her story is her second, John Frederic Murray; the professor of medicine sometimes attached to her first marriage in sloppy biographies belongs to him.
- She published Lorna Mott Comes Home — the France story run in reverse — in 2021, at eighty-seven.
FAQ
Did Diane Johnson write the novel The Shining?
No. Stephen King wrote the novel (1977). Johnson co-wrote the screenplay of the 1980 film with Stanley Kubrick, who directed it. Three people, three jobs.
Did Stephen King like the film Johnson co-wrote?
No — he disliked Kubrick’s film, calling it “a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it,” and Kubrick had rejected King’s own draft screenplay as too literal.
Did Diane Johnson win the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize?
Neither — she was a finalist for both: the National Book Award for Le Divorce (1997) and the Pulitzer Prize for Persian Nights (1988). The prize Le Divorce won is the California Book Award gold medal for fiction.
Where did Diane Johnson get her degrees?
She attended Stephens College (1951–53), took her B.A. at the University of Utah (1957), and her M.A. (1966) and Ph.D. (1968) at UCLA. She then taught at UC Davis from 1968 to 1987.
Is The Shadow Knows a ghost story?
No. It is psychological horror: a divorced mother in Sacramento who may or may not be being stalked. Nothing supernatural happens — the uncertainty is the point, and it is why Kubrick hired her.
Did Diane Johnson write the 2003 film of Le Divorce?
No. She wrote the 1997 novel. The film was directed by James Ivory; no screenplay credit for Johnson on it is supported by the record. Her screenplay credit remains The Shining.