What famous last words of The Dark Tower series also began the series?

The famous line is “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” It opens Stephen King’s first Dark Tower novel, The Gunslinger, and is repeated at the end of the seventh and final novel, The Dark Tower.

The sentence introduces the central pursuit of the saga: Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, tracking the mysterious Man in Black across the deserts of Mid-World. That chase eventually expands into Roland’s larger quest for the Dark Tower, a structure connected to multiple worlds and realities.

The repetition is more than a stylistic callback. At the end of The Dark Tower, Roland reaches the Tower, but the story reveals that his journey has occurred before and is destined to repeat. The cycle begins again with the same opening sentence, giving the series a deliberately circular structure.

A common mix-up is confusing this with the ending of The Gunslinger itself, whose conclusion is different. The quoted sentence is specifically the opening line of the series and the closing line of its final volume. The first Dark Tower story appeared in 1982, while the concluding novel was published in 2004.