Stephen King

THE FACT ABOUT STEPHEN KING

Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author, screenwriter, musician, columnist, actor, film producer and director. Having sold an estimated 300-350 million copies of his books, King is best known for his work in horror fiction, in which he demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the genre's history. He has also written science fiction, fantasy, short-fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, teleplays and stageplays. Many of his stories have been adapted for other media, including movies, television series and comic books. King has written a number of books using the pen name Richard Bachman and one short story where he was credited as John Swithen. In 2003 he received The National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Early Life

Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine on September 21, 1947 to Donald Edwin and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. When King was two years old, his father left the family under the pretense of going to buy a pack of cigarettes, leaving his mother to raise King and his adopted older brother David by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. Nevertheless, King has described his childhood as an innocent time.


The family moved to De Pere, Wisconsin, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Stratford, Connecticut. When King was eleven years old, the family returned to Durham, Maine, where Ruth King cared for her parents until their deaths. She then became a caterer in a local residential facility for the mentally challenged.

As a child, King apparently witnessed one of his friends being struck and killed by a train, though he has no memory of the event. His family told him that after leaving home to play with the boy, King returned, speechless and seemingly in shock. Only later did the family learn of the friend's death. Some commentators have suggested that this event may have psychologically inspired King's dark, disturbing creations, but King himself has dismissed the idea.

King's primary inspiration for writing horror fiction was related in detail in his 1981 non-fiction Danse Macabre, in a chapter titled "An Annoying Autobiographical Pause". King makes a comparison of his grandfather successfully dowsing for water using the bough of an apple branch with the sudden realization of what he wanted to do for a living. While browsing through an attic with his elder brother, King uncovered a paperback version of an H.P. Lovecraft collection of short stories that had belonged to his father. The cover art—an illustration of a monster hiding within the recesses of a hell-like cavern beneath a tombstone—was, he writes,

“the moment of my life when the dowsing rod suddenly went down hard . . . as far as I was concerned, I was on my way.”

Education and Early Creativity

King attended Durham Elementary School. He displayed an early interest in horror as an avid reader of EC's horror comics, including Tales from the Crypt (he later paid tribute to the comics in his screenplay for Creepshow). He began writing for fun while still in school, contributing articles to Dave's Rag, the newspaper that his brother published with a mimeograph machine and later began selling stories to his friends which were based on movies he had seen (though when discovered by his teachers, he was forced to return the profits).

The first of his stories to be independently published was "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber", serialized over three published and one unpublished issues of a fanzine, Comics Review, in 1965. That story was published the following year in a revised form as "In a Half-World of Terror" in another fanzine, Stories of Suspense, edited by Marv Wolfman.

From 1966, King studied English at the University of Maine, where he graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Science in English. He wrote a column for the student newspaper, the Maine Campus, titled "King's Garbage Truck", took part in a writing workshop organized by Burton Hatlen, and took odd jobs to pay for his studies, including one at an industrial laundry. He sold his first professional short story, "The Glass Floor", to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. The Fogler Library at UMaine now holds many of King's papers.

After leaving the university, King gained a certificate to teach high school but, being unable to find a teaching post immediately, initially supplemented his laboring wage by selling short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier. Many of these early stories have been published in the collection "Night Shift". In 1971, King married Tabitha Spruce, a fellow student at the University of Maine whom he had met at the University's Fogler Library. That fall, King was hired as a teacher at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. He continued to contribute short stories to magazines and worked on ideas for novels. It was during this time that King developed a drinking problem, which stayed with him for more than a decade.

Success with Carrie

On Mother's Day, 1973, King's novel Carrie was accepted by publishing house Doubleday. King has written how he became so discouraged when trying to develop the idea of a girl with psychic powers into a novel that he threw an early draft in the trash, but his wife, Tabitha, rescued it and encouraged him to finish it. He received a $2,500 advance (not large for a novel, even at that time) but the paperback rights eventually earned $400,000, with half going to the publisher. King and his family relocated to Southern Maine because of his mother's failing health. At this time, he began writing a book titled Second Coming, later titled Jerusalem's Lot, before finally changing the title to 'Salem's Lot (published 1975).

Soon after the release of Carrie in 1974, his mother died of uterine cancer. His Aunt Emrine read the novel to her before she died. King has written of his severe drinking problem at this time, stating that he was drunk while delivering the eulogy at his mother's funeral.

After his mother's death, King and his family moved to Boulder, Colorado, where King wrote The Shining (published 1977). The family returned to western Maine in 1975, where King completed his fourth novel, The Stand (published 1978). In 1977, the family traveled briefly to England, returning to Maine that fall where King began teaching creative writing at the University of Maine. King has kept his primary residence in Maine ever since.

Richard Bachman

In the late 1970s-early 1980s, King published a handful of short novels—Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Road Work (1981), The Running Man (1982) and Thinner (1984)—under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The idea behind this was largely an experiment to measure for himself whether or not he could replicate his own success again, and allay at least part of the notion inside his own head that popularity might all be just an accident of fate. An alternate (or additional) explanation was because of publishing standards at the time allowing only a single book a year.

The Bachman novels contained hints to the author's actual identity that were picked up on by fans, leading to King's admission of authorship in 1985. King dedicated his 1989 book The Dark Half, about a pseudonym turning on a writer, to "the deceased Richard Bachman", and in 1996, when the Stephen King novel Desperation was released, the companion novel The Regulators carried the "Bachman" byline.

In 2006, during a press conference in London, King declared that he had discovered another Bachman novel, titled Blaze. It was published on June 12, 2007. In fact, the manuscript had been held at King's alma mater, the University of Maine in Orono, for many years and had been covered by numerous King experts. King completely rewrote the 1973 manuscript for its publication.

Confronting Addiction

Shortly after The Tommyknockers publication in 1987, King's family and friends staged an intervention, dumping evidence of his addiction taken from the trash including beer cans, cigarette butts, grams of cocaine, Xanax, Valium, NyQuil, dextromethorphan (cough medicine) and marijuana, on the rug in front of him. As King related in his memoir, he then sought help and quit all forms of drugs and alcohol in the late 1980s, and has remained sober since.

Car accident and Thoughts of Retirement

In the summer of 1999, King had finished the memoir section of On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, but had abandoned the book for nearly eighteen months, unsure of how or whether to proceed.

On June 19, at about 4:30 p.m., he was walking on the shoulder of Route 5, in Center Lovell, Maine. Driver Bryan Smith, distracted by an unrestrained dog moving in the back of his minivan, struck King, who landed in a depression in the ground about 14 feet from the pavement of Route 5. According to Oxford County Sheriff deputy Matt Baker, King was struck from behind and some witnesses said the driver was not speeding or reckless. King's website, however, says King was walking facing traffic.

King was conscious enough to give the deputy phone numbers to contact his family but was in considerable pain. The author was first transported to Northern Cumberland Hospital, in Bridgton, and then flown by helicopter to Central Maine Hospital, in Lewiston. His injuries—a collapsed right lung, multiple fractures of his right leg, scalp laceration and a broken hip—kept him in Central Maine Medical Center until July 9, almost three weeks.

Earlier that year, King had finished most of From a Buick 8, a novel in which a character dies after getting struck by a car. Of the similarities, King says that he tries "not to make too much of it."

After five operations in ten days and physical therapy, King resumed work on On Writing in July, though his hip was still shattered and he could only sit for about forty minutes before the pain became intolerable.

King's lawyer and two others purchased Smith's van for $1,500, reportedly to prevent it from appearing on eBay. The van was later crushed at a junkyard after King had severely beaten it with a baseball bat. King later mentioned during an interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross that he wanted to completely destroy the vehicle himself with a sledgehammer.

A fictionalized account of the accident was written into the last novel of the "Dark Tower" series. Parts of the conversation between Smith and King, as he awaited medical attention, were used in the book, as well as an accurate description of the injuries sustained.

Two years later, King suffered severe pneumonia as a direct result of his lung being punctured in the accident. During this time, Tabitha King was inspired to redesign his studio. Stephen visited the space while his books and belongings were packed away. What he saw was an image of what his studio would look like if he died, providing a seed for his novel Lisey's Story.

In 2002, King announced he would stop writing, apparently motivated in part by frustration with his injuries, which had made sitting uncomfortable and reduced his stamina. He has since resumed writing, but states on his website that:

"I'm writing but I'm writing at a much slower pace than previously and I think that if I come up with something really, really good, I would be perfectly willing to publish it because that still feels like the final act of the creative process, publishing it so people can read it and you can get feedback and people can talk about it with each other and with you, the writer, but the force of my invention has slowed down a lot over the years and that's as it should be."

Family Life

King owns two houses, one in Bangor, and one in Center, Lovell, Maine, while he and his wife regularly spend winter in their waterfront mansion located off the Gulf of Mexico, in Sarasota, Florida. He and Tabitha have three children and three grandchildren.


Tabitha King has published nine of her own novels. Both King's sons are published authors: Owen King published his first collection of stories, We're All in This Together: A Novella and Stories, in 2005; Joseph Hillstrom published an award-winning collection of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts, in 2005, and his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box will be adapted by Irish director Neil Jordan for a 2008 Warner Bros release. King's daughter Naomi spent two years as a minister in the Unitarian Universalist Church, in Utica, New York, where she lived with her partner, Rev. Dr. Thandeka. Naomi now ministers for the Unitarian Universalist Church of River of Grass, in Plantation, South Florida.

Since 2000

In 2000, King published a serialized novel, The Plant, over the Internet, bypassing print publication. At first it was thought that sales were unsuccessful and he abandoned the project, but King later revealed that he simply ran out of stories.

Since August 2003, King has provided his take on pop culture in a column appearing on the back page of Entertainment Weekly, usually every third week. The column is called "The Pop of King", a reference to "The King of Pop", Michael Jackson.

In October 2005, King signed a deal with Marvel Comics to publish a seven-issue, miniseries spin-off of The Dark Tower series called The Gunslinger Born. The series, which focuses on a young Roland Deschain, is plotted by Robin Furth, dialogued by Peter David, and illustrated by Eisner Award-winning artist Jae Lee. The first issue was published on February 7, 2007, and because of its connection with King, David, Lee and Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada appeared at a midnight signing at a Times Square, New York comic book store to promote it. The work had sold over 200,000 copies by March 2007.

On February 14, 2007, Joblo.com announced[20] that plans were underway for Lost co-creator J. J. Abrams to do an adaptation of King's epic Dark Tower series.

In June 2007, King's novel Blaze, which was written in the early 1970s, under his long-time pseudonym Richard Bachman, was published. A novel, Duma Key was published in January 2008; and King has written a musical play with John Mellencamp titled Ghost Brothers of Darkland County.

On April 20, 2007, King commented on the Virginia Tech massacre in Entertainment Weekly.

On August 15, 2007, King was mistaken for a vandal in an Alice Springs bookstore. King was signing books authored by himself when a customer reported there was a vandal scribbling in volumes in the fiction section.

During the 2008 presidential election, King voiced his support of Democratic candidate (new President as of January) Barack Obama.

A controversy emerged on May 5, 2008, when a conservative blogger posted a clip of King at a Library of Congress reading event. King, talking to high-school students, had said: "If you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that."The comment was described by the blog as "another in a long line of liberal media members bashing the military," and likened to John Kerry's similar remark from 2006. King responded later that day, saying, "That a right-wing-blog would impugn my patriotism because I said children should learn to read, and could get better jobs by doing so, is beneath contempt...I live in a national guard town, and I support our troops, but I don’t support either the war or educational policies that limit the options of young men and women to any one career—military or otherwise." King again defended his comment in an interview with the Bangor Daily News on May 8, saying, "I’m not going to apologize for promoting that kids get better education in high school, so they have more options. Those that don’t agree with what I’m saying, I’m not going to change their minds."

King's latest short stories collection titled Just After Sunset was released on November 11, 2008. It features 13 short stories.

King is currently working on a new novel entitled Under the Dome, a reworking of an unfinished novel he tried writing twice in the 1980s, to be published in 2009.

King recently released N., a novella that is featured in Just After Sunset, as a serialised animated series that can be seen for free, or, for a small payment, can be downloaded in a higher quality.

There are rumors, but as yet unconfirmed, that King's future project will be the third Talisman book. This would follow The Talisman and Black House, and would likely be co-written again with Peter Straub.