Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author best known for his enormously popular horror novels.
King's stories frequently involve an unremarkable protagonist such as a middle-class family, a child, or many times, a writer. The characters are involved in their everyday lives, but the supernatural encounters and extraordinary circumstances escalate over the course of the story. 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. He also writes stories outside the horror genre, including the novellas The Body and Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (adapted as the movies Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, respectively), as well as The Green Mile and Hearts in Atlantis.
King was the 2003 recipient of The National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Early Biography[]
Stephen King was born in 1947 in Portland, Maine and is of Scots-Irish ancestry. When King was two years old, his father deserted his family. His mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King, raised King and his adopted older brother David by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. The family moved to Ruth's home town of Durham, Maine but also spent brief periods in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Stratford, Connecticut. King attended Durham Elementary School and Lisbon High School. He grew to stand 6'4" tall.
King has been writing since an early age. When in school, he wrote stories based on movies he had seen recently 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 a newspaper, "Dave's Rag," which he self-published. "Dave's Rag" was about local events, and King would often contribute. At around the age of thirteen, King discovered a box of his father's old books at his aunt's house, mainly horror and science fiction. He was immediately hooked on these genres.
From 1966 to 1971, King studied English at the University of Maine at Orono, Maine. At the university, he wrote a column titled "King's Garbage Truck" in the university magazine. He also met Tabitha Spruce; they married in china 1971. King took on odd jobs to pay for his studies, including one at an industrial laundry. He used the experience to write the short story The Mangler. The campus period in his life is readily evident in the second part of Hearts in Atlantis.
After finishing his university studies with a Bachelor of Arts in English and obtaining a certificate to teach high school, King taught English at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. During this time, he and his family lived in a trailer. He wrote short stories (most were published in men's magazines) to help make ends meet. As told in the introduction in Carrie, if one of his kids got a cold, Tabitha would joke, "Come on, Steve, think of a monster". King also developed a drinking problem which stayed with him for over a decade.
During this period, King began a billion of novels. One of his first ideas was of a young girl with psychic powers. However, he grew discouraged, and threw it into the trash. Tabitha later rescued it and encouraged him to finish it. After completing the novel, he titled it Carrie, sent it to Doubleday, and more or less forgot about it. Later, he received an offer to buy it with a $2,500 advance (not a large advance for a novel, even at that time). Shortly after, the value of Carrie was realized with the paperback rights being sold for $400,000 (with $200,000 of it going to the publisher). Shortly after its release, his mother died of uterine cancer. He had the novel read to her before she died.
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 even admits that he was drunk during his mother’s funeral while delivering the eulogy. He states that he had based the alcoholic father in The Shining on himself, though he did not admit it (even to himself) 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, dextromethorphan (cough medicine), and marijuana. He sought help and quit all forms of drugs and alcohol in the late 1980's, and has remained sober.
Richard Bachman[]
After publishing many wildly successful novels under his own name, King wanted to know if some of his early works (those written before Carrie) would sell without having his name on them. He also worried that many of the non-horror novels he wanted to write would clash with the expectations of his fans. So he convinced his publisher, Signet Books, to print these novels under a pseudonym. The name "Richard Bachman" was supposedly chosen partly in tribute to crime author Donald E. Westlake's long-running pseudonym Richard Stark, and partly in honour of Bachman Turner Overdrive, a band King was listening to at the time he chose his pen name.
The above entries use some text from Wikipedia.org (English version) and therefore is public domain
NOVELS[]
Carrie (1974)
Salem's Lot (1975)
The Shining (1977)
The Stand (1978)
The Dead Zone (1979)
Firestarter (1980)
Cujo (1981)
The Mist (1981)
Pet Sematary (1982)
Christine (1983)
Cycle of the Werewolf (1984)
The Eyes of the Dragon (1986)
It (1986)
Misery (1987)
The Tommyknockers (1987)
The Dark Half (1989)
The Stand, the Complete And Uncut Edition (1990)
Needful Things (1991)
Gerald's Game (1992)
Dolores Claiborne (1992)
Insomnia (1994)
The Shawshank Redemption: The Shooting Script (1994) (with Frank Darabont)
Rose Madder (1995)
Desperation (1996)
The Green Mile (1996)
Bag of Bones (1998)
Storm of the Century (1999)
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999)
Dreamcatcher (2001)
From a Buick 8 (2002)
The Colorado Kid (2005)
Cell (2006)
Lisey's Story (2006)
COLLECTIONS[]
Night Shift (1978)
Different Seasons (1982)
Skeleton Crew (1985)
Four Past Midnight (1990)
Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993)
Gray Matter: And Other Stories (1993)
Six Stories (1997)
Hearts in Atlantis (1999)
Blood and Smoke (audio) (1999)
Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction On The Craft Of Writing (2000)
Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales (2002)
The Man in the Black Suit: 4 Dark Tales (2002)
The Secretary of Dreams (2006)
SERIES[]
The Dark Tower
1. The Gunslinger (1982)
2. The Drawing of the Three (1985)
3. The Waste Lands (1991)
4. Wizard and Glass (1997)
5. The Dark Tower Box Set (omnibus) (2003)
6. Wolves of the Calla (2003)
7. Song of Susannah (2004)
8. The Dark Tower (2004)
Talisman (with Peter Straub)
1. The Talisman (1984)
2. Black House (2001)
3. The Talisman And Black House (omnibus) (2003)
The Green Mile
1. The Two Dead Girls (1996)
2. The Mouse on the Mile (1996)
3. Coffey's Hands (1996)
4. The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix (1996)
5. Night Journey (1996)
6. Coffey on the Mile (1996)
MOVIES & TV[]
Apt Pupil - Movie
Bag of Bones - Movie
Carrie - Movie
Cat's Eye - Movie
Children of the Corn - Movie
Christine - Movie
Creepshow I - Movie
Creepshow II - Movie
Cujo - Movie
The Dark Half - Movie
The Dead Zone - Movie
Desperation - TV Movie
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer - Movie
Dolores Claiborne - Movie
Dreamcatcher - Movie
Firestarter - Movie
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - Movie
The Golden Years - TV Series
Graveyard Shift - Movie
The Green Mile - Movie
Hearts in Atlantis - Movie
It - TV Movie
Kingdom Hospital - TV Series
The Langoliers - TV Movie
The Mangler - Movie
Maximum Overdrive - Movie
Misery - Movie
The Mist - Movie
Needful Things - Movie
The Night Flier - Movie
Nightmares and Dreamscapes - TV Movie
Pet Sematary - Movie
Quicksilver Highway - TV Movie
Riding the Bullet - Movie
Rose Red - TV Movie
The Running Man - Movie
Salem's Lot - TV Movie
Salem's Lot - TV Movie
Secret Window - Movie
The Shawshank Redemption - Movie
The Shining - Movie
The Shining - TV Movie
Silver Bullet - Movie
Sleepwalkers - Movie
Sometimes They Come Back - TV Movie
Stand By Me - Movie
The Stand - TV Movie
Storm of the Century - TV Movie
The Sun Dog - Movie
Thinner - Movie
Tommyknockers - TV Movie
Trucks - TV Movie
Word Processor of the Gods (Tales from the Darkside, Season 1, Episode 9) - TV Show