To Don Grant, who's taken a chance on these novels, one by one.
The Drawing of the Three is the second volume of a long tale called The Dark Tower, a tale inspired by and to some degree dependent upon Robert Browning's narrative poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (which in its turn owes a debt to King Lear). The first volume, The Gunslinger, tells how Roland, the last gunslinger of a world which has "moved on," finally catches up with the man in black ... a sorcerer he has chased for a very long time