World War II

World War II marks a decisive turning point in the Overlook Hotel's history, separating its original construction and early struggles from its postwar transformation into a playground for the rich and, later, the criminal underworld. The war's end in 1945 coincides with the hotel's most celebrated event, a masked ball that inaugurates a new era of glamour and corruption, and the conflict's aftermath directly shapes the hotel's physical layout, ownership, and the dark legacy that ultimately consumes the Torrance family.

Historical Context and the Hotel's Early Years

The Overlook Hotel was built between 1907 and 1909, decades before World War II, and changed hands multiple times in its early years, struggling to turn a profit. The war itself created a gap in the hotel's recorded history; Jack Torrance, while exploring the basement archives, notes that there are no records from 1937 to 1945, a period when the hotel was likely closed. The war's end, however, brought a dramatic rebirth. In 1945, millionaire Horace Derwent purchased the hotel and completely renovated it, turning a "decrepit relic into a showplace." It was Derwent who added the roque court, a feature that later becomes a central symbol of violence. The war's conclusion also provided the occasion for the hotel's grand reopening: a masked ball on August 29, 1945, an event that Jack later hallucinates as a living, decadent party.

The Postwar Transformation and the Masked Ball

The end of World War II in 1945 is the catalyst for the Overlook's most famous and infamous era. Horace Derwent, a millionaire inventor, pilot, film producer, and entrepreneur, funneled over a million dollars into the hotel, installing electric flambeaux throughout the building and commissioning the roque court. The grand opening was celebrated with a masked ball, an invitation to which Jack discovers in the scrapbook. The invitation, dated August 29, 1945, requests the pleasure of the recipient's company at a masked ball to celebrate the grand opening, with dinner at 8 P.M. and unmasking at midnight. This event, which Jack imagines in vivid detail—tuxedos, champagne, and the cry of "Unmask!"—represents the hotel's peak of glamour and its simultaneous descent into moral decay. The party becomes a recurring, malevolent presence in the hotel, a ghostly echo of that single night.

The War's Aftermath and the Hotel's Decline

The postwar period also saw the Overlook become entangled with organized crime. Derwent sold the hotel in the early 1950s, and it eventually fell into the hands of a Las Vegas group, High Country Investments, which operated it as a key club for wealthy executives. This led to a notorious gangland murder in 1966, when crime figure Vittorio Gienelli was shot dead in the Presidential Suite. Jack, researching the hotel's history, discovers newspaper clippings about this event, including a gruesome photograph of the blood-splattered wall. The war's end, therefore, did not bring lasting peace to the Overlook; instead, it ushered in an era of corruption, violence, and supernatural haunting that would ultimately claim Jack Torrance's sanity and life.

The War as a Symbolic Marker

World War II functions as a symbolic boundary in the novel, separating a time of relative innocence from a period of accumulated evil. The hotel's pre-war history is marked by financial failure and personal tragedy, but the postwar era is defined by deliberate, organized malevolence. The war's end also marks the beginning of the hotel's most potent supernatural activity, as if the collective energy of the 1945 masked ball—a celebration of victory and excess—somehow awakened or empowered the malevolent force within the hotel. Jack's own father, a violent alcoholic, served as a male nurse during the war, and Jack's memories of his father's abuse are intertwined with the hotel's own history of violence, suggesting a cyclical pattern of trauma that the war both interrupts and intensifies.