Stephen King
This page is about Stephen Edwin King, the writer. There is also Stephen King, a convicted British paedophile.
Stephen Edwin King (born
September 21,
1947) is a prolific
American author best known for his
horror novels. King's books have been extremely popular, and are among the top-selling books ever,
fiction or
non-fiction.
King's stories often involve an unremarkable character—middle-class families, children, and often writers—being submerged into increasingly horrifying circumstances. He also produces more typically literary work, as can be seen in the novellas
The Body and
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (later adapted as the movies
Stand by Me and
The Shawshank Redemption, respectively), as well as in
The Green Mile. King evinces a thorough knowledge of the horror genre, as shown in his nonfiction book
Danse Macabre, which chronicles several decades of notable works in both literature and cinema.
Stephen King was born in
Portland, Maine to Donald and Ruth Pillsbury King. When Stephen was very young, his father left and Ruth raised Stephen and his older brother David by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. Some of his formative childhood years were spent in
Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Stephen King has been writing since an early age. When in school, he wrote stories (plagiarized from what he'd been reading at the time) and sold them to his friends. This was not popular among his teachers, and he was forced to return his profits when this was discovered.
The stories were copied using a
mimeo machine that his brother David used to copy his magazine called "Dave's Rag" that he published himself. "Dave's Rag" was about local events, and Stephen would often contribute. At around the age of thirteen, Stephen discovered a box of his father's old books at his aunt's house, mainly
horror and
science fiction. He was immediately hooked on the genre.
From
1966 to
1970, King studied
English at the
University of Maine. There, King wrote a column in the school magazine called "King's Garbage Truck". At the university he also met
Tabitha Spruce to whom he was married in
1971. To pay for his studies, King took on odd jobs. One of them was at an industrial laundry, on which he drew material for the short story "The Mangler". This period in his life shows through in the second part of
Hearts in Atlantis.
After finishing his university studies with a B.S. in English, King took a job as an English teacher at Hampden Academy in
Hampden, Maine. He lived with Tabitha and at least one child in a trailer. Making ends meet was sometimes difficult, and the money that came from short stories, published mainly in men's magazines, was very useful. King also developed a drinking problem which stayed with him for over a decade.
During this period, King began a number of novels. One of them told the story of a young girl with psychic powers. Frustrated with it, he threw it into the trash. Later, he discovered that Tabitha had rescued it; she encouraged him to finish it as
Carrie. He sent it to a friend at
Doubleday and more or less forgot about it. Some time later, he received an offer to buy it with a $2,500 advance (not a large advance for a novel, even at that time). Years later, the paperback rights sold for $400,000. King's mother died of
uterine cancer in February
1974, shortly after King started receiving money from the sale of
Carrie.
In
On Writing, King admits that at this time he was consistently drunk and that he was an alcoholic for well over a decade (he states that he'd based the alcoholic father in
The Shining on himself, though he didn't admit it for several years).
Shortly after the publication of
The Tommyknockers, King's family and friends finally intervened, dumping his trash on the rug in front of him to show him the evidence of his own addictions: beer cans, cigarette butts, grams of
cocaine,
Xanax,
Valium,
NyQuil. He sought help, and quit drinking in the late 1980s.
King fans will note that the relative wealth of King's characters has risen through the decades, but not as precipitously as King's wealth itself: his earliest works (
Carrie,
The Shining, as well as much of the work in
Night Shift) dealt with working-class families struggling from paycheck to paycheck in minimum-wage jobs; his late-80s work involved middle-class people like teachers and authors; his late 90s work, airplane pilots and others who can frequently afford a second home. Nevertheless, his work has remained immensely popular.
In the summer of
1999 King was in the middle of
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft; he'd finished the memoir section and abandoned the book for nearly eighteen months, unsure of how to proceed or whether to bother. King reports that it was the first book he'd abandoned since writing
The Stand decades earlier. He had just decided to continue the book—on
June 17 he had written up a list of questions he was frequently asked about writing, as well as some he wished he would be asked about it; on
June 18 he had written four pages of the section on writing. On
June 19, he was taking a walk after driving his son to the airport, intending to return home to go see
The General's Daughter with his family. He was walking up a hill when a Dodge van crested the top on the shoulder of the road and hit him, throwing him about 14 feet in the air. King barely missed the driver's side support post in the van, and also barely missed a spread of rocks on the ground near where he landed—either of which could have killed him or put him in a permanent
coma. Unable to get up, King was rushed to a local hospital, which reported that they could not treat him. He was then flown to another hospital; in the helicopter he suffered a
collapsed lung. In addition to the collapsed lung, King suffered a leg broken in at least nine places, a split knee, a broken right hip, four broken ribs, and a spine chipped in eight places. Coincidentally, that same year King had written most of
From a Buick 8 in which one of the characters dies in an automobile accident, but King says that he "tried not to make too much of it." Bryan Smith, the driver of the van, was brought before a
grand jury and indicted on two counts: driving to endanger and aggravated assault. He plead guilty to driving to endanger, the lesser charge, was sentenced to six months' jail time (sentence suspended) and had his
driver's license suspended for a year (he had nearly a dozen previous infractions on record). In September
2000 Smith was discovered dead in his trailer. The cause of death was unknown.
King was released from the hospital after three weeks, then went through half a dozen surgeries on his leg and the accompanying
physical therapy. In July
1999 he continued
On Writing, though his hip was still shattered and he could sit for barely forty minutes at a stretch before the pain became intolerable. Over time his condition improved. It was reported that Mr. King forgave the driver (unfortunate as it was, it was an accident, after all) and actually purchased the van in question for $1,500. As mentioned in the author's note of a recent novel, among other places, he expressed a wish to have the car dismantled, which would bring him "great satisfaction".
In January
2002 he announced that he would retire from writing and would publish no more works after completing the projects then underway. However, he later retracted this claim, saying the journalist he spoke with probably assumed more than he had actually said. While King does plan to slow down significantly, he will most likely not stop writing altogether.
In 1994, King won an O. Henry Award for his short story, "The Man in the Black Suit", and in 2003 King was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Awards.
Stephen King has also written six books under the
pseudonym Richard Bachman. King staged a mock funeral for Bachman after the pseudonym was made public, which in turn inspired the book
The Dark Half, in which a novelist stages the burial of his horror author pseudonym after having a "serious" novel published, only to find that his alter ego does not want to leave quite so easily. Stephen King lives in the
Bangor, Maine area with his wife
Tabitha King, who is also a novelist. Their three children, Naomi Rachel, Joe Hill, and Owen Phillip, are now grown and living on their own. Naomi recently (2000) married her longtime girlfriend Thandeka, who is a school teacher, in Tennessee.
King plays guitar in the band The Rock Bottom Remainders whose members include
Dave Barry,
Ridley Pearson,
Scott Turow,
Amy Tan,
James McBride,
Mitch Albom, Roy Blount Jr,
Matt Groening, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, and Greg Iles.
Bibliography
See also: Castle Rock, Maine, Derry, Philtrum Press
Films and TV
King optioned his films to student filmmakers for one dollar; yet, disgusted with the treatment most of his work had gotten in film, in 1986 he decided to direct Maximum Overdrive himself, using a screenplay he had written based on his short story "Trucks." The experience seems to have sated his desire to direct.
External Links
\n* Stephen King's Official Web Site\n*
Stephen & Tabitha King Foundation\n*
Lilja's Library\n*
Stephen King FAQ\n*
The Uncollected Stephen King\n*
Stephen King News\n*
List of King short stories, with publication information\n*
IMDb entry for Stephen King\n*
Stephen King's Russian Fan Club
\n\n \n \n \n
King, Stephen\nKing, Stephen\nKing, Stephen\nKing, Stephen\n*
