Twenty-five years after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, Vanity Fair writer Paul Elie hears from Rushdie himself and authors including Stephen King, Ian McEwan, E. L. Doctorow, Gay Talese, and Martin Amis, as well as editors from Viking and Penguin, the book’s respective U.K. and American publishers, about how the prophetic and provocative book made its author a hunted man and unleashed a fury around the world. Bombs exploded in bookshops in the U.S. and the U.K.; the book’s Japanese translator was shot and killed, its Italian translator was stabbed, its Turkish translator was attacked, its Norwegian publisher was shot, and two clerics in Saudi Arabia and Tunisia who spoke out against the fatwa were shot and killed. In total, Elie writes, more than 60 people died in the controversy.

READ THE FULL STORY: A Fundamental Fight

Stephen King went so far as to intervene on Rushdie’s behalf when a number of bookstores in the U.S. announced plans not to sell the book or to remove it from their shelves. At the behest of two Viking editors, King called the chief of bookstore chain B. Dalton and gave him an ultimatum: “You don’t sell The Satanic Verses, you don’t sell Stephen King.” The store reversed course. “You can’t let intimidation stop books,” King now says, recalling the episode. “It’s as basic as that. Books are life itself.”

Martin Amis tells Elie that Prince Charles refused to support the British-Indian Rushdie. “I had an argument with Prince Charles at a small dinner party,” Amis recollects. “He said—very typically, it seems to me—‘I’m sorry, but if someone insults someone else’s deepest convictions, well then,’ blah blah blah . . . And I said that a novel doesn’t set out to insult anyone. ‘It sets out to give pleasure to its readers,’ I told him. ‘A novel is an essentially playful undertaking, and this is an exceedingly playful novel.’ The Prince took it on board, but I’d suppose the next night at a different party he would have said the same thing.”

Ian McEwan recalls the fear that pervaded time spent with Rushdie, including a dinner party at McEwan’s Gloucestershire cottage. “I remember standing the next morning with Salman in the country kitchen, a gray English morning, and he was the lead item on the BBC—another Middle East figure saying he too would condemn him to death. It was a very sad moment—standing buttering toast and listening to that awful message on the radio.”

For his part, Rushdie recalls that a number of prominent authors surrounded him with support. While lunching at London’s Reform Club on winter’s day in 1989, Graham Greene called out to him: “Rushdie! Come and sit here and tell me how you managed to make so much trouble! I never made nearly as much trouble as that!” Rushdie recalls, “This was oddly comforting.” England’s most famous living author was making light of the fix he was in.