Stephen King

American novelist

• Born: September 21, 1947
• Place of Birth: Portland, Maine

Through his storytelling and vivid imagination, Stephen King brought the horror genre to the forefront of popular literature. He also modernized many gothic and horror themes and techniques. His novels, short stories, and films have become award-winning horror classics that epitomize the genre.

Early Life

Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, at Maine General Hospital in Portland, Maine, the second son of Nellie Ruth Pillsbury and Donald Edwin King. His older brother, David, was two years older. When King was only two years old, his father, a captain in the merchant marines, deserted the family and never saw them again. This desertion placed hardships upon the young family, forcing them to move often so that Nellie could provide for her two sons. In their search for a place to call home, the family lived in Maine, Massachusetts, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana. Finally, when King was six years old, the family settled in Stratford, Connecticut, where they lived for six years.

King became interested in the horror genre early in life. He listened to suspenseful radio dramas and eventually came under the spell of good storytelling such as that in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and in horror films such as Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). He also eagerly read horror comic books. The real potential of other worlds came into young King’s life in 1957 with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1. King’s teachers reported that one of his greatest passions was writing stories of his own, an activity that began when he was six years old. He sometimes mimeographed his stories and sold them to friends.

In 1958, when King was eleven years old, his family moved to Durham, Maine. It was here that the future writer discovered that he had something in common with his absent father. King discovered an old trunk in the attic of his aunt and uncle’s garage that contained a box of his father’s books, including some by New England horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and some of Donald’s own early attempts at writing short stories.

King continued his interest in writing throughout his public education and, after graduating from Lisbon Falls High School, entered the University of Maine in Orono in 1966. There, he pursued a degree in English; wrote the “King’s Garbage Truck” column for the campus newspaper, The Daily Maine; and submitted short stories to all publications he thought might be interested in his work. In 1967, he made his first sale as an author with the purchase of his short story “The Glass Floor” for thirty-five dollars by Startling Mystery Stories. King continued his college education and filled empty hours by working campus jobs, writing, protesting, and courting his future wife, University of Maine student and library worker Tabitha Spruce.

King graduated from the university in 1970 and accepted a position as an English teacher at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine, in 1971. In this same year, King married the recently graduated Spruce, who later became a novelist in her own right. The young couple lived in a small mobile home and held second jobs, King in an industrial laundry and Spruce in a donut shop, to supplement King’s meager teaching salary of $6,400 per year. During this time they began their family.

Life’s Work

Although his early married life proved to be taxing, King did not forgo his drive to write. Often the small amounts that his short stories brought were used to purchase medicine for his children or to finance the repair of a major appliance. When he was not teaching or working in the laundry, King produced several manuscripts, often typing in the furnace room of the Kings’ mobile home. He freely threw away pieces in which he saw no real potential. One such effort was saved from the garbage by his wife, who saw more than her husband did in the discarded germ of an idea. She argued that there was something of value to be found in the fragment that he had thrown away and that he should complete what he had begun.

Following his wife’s encouragement, King finished the manuscript, which was eventually published as Carrie (1974). With the sale of Carrie to Doubleday for a $2,500 advance (he later sold the paperback rights for $400,000 and saw the novel turned into an award-winning motion picture starring Sissy Spacek), King knew that he could earn his way as a writer and gave up his teaching position to write full time.

The books that followed Carrie were received with varying degrees of acceptance. After King published his modernized vampire tale Salem’s Lot (1975) and proposed that his third book, The Shining (1977), would be a ghost story, his agent feared that the young writer from Maine would be typecast, but King had no fear of failing at his craft or in his chosen genre. His later publication successes proved he had made the correct choice. During this period King began to drink alcohol to excess; in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), he reveals that he often was drunk. Friends intervened, and with the help of counseling, he overcame the problem permanently in the late 1980s.

In 1981, King published Danse Macabre to explore the horror film genre and to illuminate his fascination with both motion pictures and literature based upon investigations of humanity’s darker emotional and psychological sides. In producing his own works of horror, King soon found that the clearest way for him to approach a piece of fiction in progress was to seek an answer to the question “What if?”

From his earlier works on, “What if?” has been central to each of King’s works, and he answered it in several ways: as it related to how individuals would act following almost total annihilation of humanity in The Stand (1978), to the actions of obsessive fans in Misery (1987), to the effect extraterrestrial visitors might have on a community in The Tommyknockers (1987), and to the reactions of various individuals to capital punishment in the six-part work The Green Mile (1996).

In addition to his many novels, King also wrote numerous successful short stories, including “The Body” (in Different Seasons, 1982), “The Woman in the Room” (in Night Shift, 1978), and “Word Processor of the Gods” (in Skeleton Crew, 1985). In addition, he produced seven novels under the name Richard Bachman to find out if he could replicate his original publishing success, to publish works that did not quite fit the Stephen King persona, and to allow him to publish more than one book per year, an industry limitation at the time. The true identity of Bachman, under whose name King published Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man (1982), Thinner (1984), The Regulators (1996), and Blaze (2007, rewritten from a 1973 manuscript), was eventually made public because of the curiosity and research of a bookstore clerk. King’s audience grew even larger as film and television versions of his works and original screenplays by King caught the attention of viewing audiences. Many of these versions have been passed off as weak at best; however, some have received rave reviews as well as major awards.

The motion pictures with King ties that are generally considered the best are Carrie (1976), The Dead Zone (1983), “The Body” spinoff Stand by Me (1986), The Shining (1980), and Misery (1990). He made his debut as a director with Maximum Overdrive (1985, adapted from his short story “Trucks”). Among the King television movies and miniseries were Salem’s Lot (1979), It (1990), The Tommyknockers (1993), The Stand (1994), and The Shining (1997). A member of his university dramatic society, King used this experience in several small roles in movie versions of his works, including The Stand, Creepshow (1982), and Pet Sematary (1989), and on television programs.

King was seriously injured in June 1999 while walking on the shoulder of a road near his home in Center Lovell, Maine. The driver of an oncoming car, distracted, swerved and accidentally hit him. Thrown high through the air, King suffered a collapsed lung, scalp lacerations, and a broken leg and hip. He spent three weeks recovering in a hospital. Never one to let an experience go unused, King featured a character in his next novel, Dreamcatcher (2001), who suffers similar injuries, as does the main character in the 2004 premiere of the television miniseries Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital.

The injuries made it more difficult for King to write, and in 2002 he announced that he might retire. However, he found that he could not stop thinking about stories and writing. His subsequent publications included From a Buick 8 (2002), the volumes in the Dark Tower series (2003–2012), The Colorado Kid (2005), Lisey’s Story (2006), Cell (2006), and Duma Key (2008). His short story collection Just after Sunset (2008) was awarded the Bram Stoker Award. His 2009 novel, Under the Dome, was nominated for a British Fantasy Award in 2010 and later adapted into a television series for CBS that aired from 2013 to 2015. He maintained his prolific output into the 2010s with Full Dark, No Stars (2010), 11/22/63 (2011), Joyland (2013), Ghost Brothers of Darkland County (2013), and Doctor Sleep (2013), a sequel to The Shining. He also wrote a hard-boiled detective trilogy comprised of Mr. Mercedes (2014), Finders Keepers (2015), and End of Watch (2015); Mr. Mercedes won the 2015 Edgar Award for best novel, and a television adaptation of the same name premiered on the Audience television network in August 2017. Also in 2017, King released the novel Sleeping Beauties, cowritten with his son Owen King. The novel, set in a women's prison in West Virginia, debuted at the top of the New York Times Best Sellers list on October 15, 2017. His next novels include, The Outsider (2018), The Institute (2019), and Later (2021). King shifted away from the horror genre to publish the crime novels Billy Summers (2021) and Holly (2023), and the dark fantasy novel Fairy Tale (2022). Holly followed Holly Gibnney, who appeared as a minor character in several previous books, including Mr. Mercedes and End of Watch, and as a major supporting character in The Outsider. In 2024, King published the horror short story collection You Like It Darker.

King has also has written screenplays, teleplays, and graphic novels. Among the major motion pictures developed from his later stories or screenplays are The Green Mile (1999), Hearts in Atlantis (2001), Dreamcatcher (2003), Secret Window (2004), Desperation (2006), 1408 (2007), A Good Marriage (2014), and Cell (2016). He also cowrote the musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County (2012) with John Mellencamp and T Bone Burnett. In the late 2010s, several more of King's novels were adapted to film and television, including a two-part remake of the popular film and novel It (2017) and It Chapter 2 (2019), a remake of Pet Sematary (2019), The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep (2019), and the mystery thriller television series Mr. Mercedes (2017–19). In 2018, the fantasy horror series Castle Rock, which intertwines several of King's stories, characters, and settings, premiered as a Hulu original. A second season of the show followed in 2019. The television miniseries Lisey's Story, based on King's novel of the same name, appeared in 2021. Further adaptations include the films Firestarter (2022) and The Boogeyman (2023); and the television shows The Outsider (2020), The Stand (2020–21), and Chapelwaite (2021; based on the short story Jerusalem's Lot).

The name Stephen King became familiar even to those who had never read his works. King maintains a high public profile and, at the same time, tries to maintain some degree of privacy for himself and his family. He made television spots for a major credit card and for a national publicity drive for the importance of libraries. Among the numerous honors he received for fiction are numerous Bram Stoker Awards, several Horror Guild awards, five Locus Awards, five American Library Association Awards, two Shirley Jackson Awards, an Alex Award, an O. Henry Award for the short story “The Man in the Black Suit” (1996), and four World Fantasy Awards. For his nonfiction, King has received a Bram Stoker Award, a Horror Guild Award, a Hugo Award, four Locus Awards, and a Quill Award for sports nonfiction for Faithful (2004), which he cowrote with Stewart O'Nan. In 2014, he received the National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment of Arts, and in 2020, he won the Audie Award for lifetime achievement from the American Library Association.

King and his wife, Tabitha, have three children, Joseph, Naomi, and Owen. In raising them, they strove to ensure that their children had a normal, loving family life. Owen and Joseph became writers themselves (the latter under the pen name Joe Hill); Naomi became a Unitarian minister.

Significance

Because of his vast audience and his undeniable talent, the influence of King's suspense and horror writing has had a pervasive influence on the genre and his readers. His works have been used by criminal defendants who contended that they were encouraged to carry out their crimes after having read a particular King novel. His residence in Bangor, Maine, was invaded by a distraught and mentally unbalanced man from Texas who threatened to destroy the house.

The most contentious confrontations came, however, when critics and reviewers debated the significance and quality of King’s fiction. When King was presented the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003, many critics were outraged. Yale University professor and literary critic Harold Bloom complained that King’s award signified the "dumbing down" of American culture. King and his fans were not overly concerned with the criticism. Other critics and writers have compared King to Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe and consider him to be among the best of modern storytellers. The National Book Foundation, which presented King with the medal, judged his writing to be “securely rooted in the great American tradition that glorifies spirit-of-place and the abiding power of narrative.”

Throughout his career, King has approached his work with all seriousness, writing almost daily. King is also an active philanthropist. Through grants from the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, the Kings’ donations have funded recreation programs for Bangor, Maine; educational institutions, including the University of Maine; library rebuilding programs; and poverty alleviation measures.

Bibliography

Beahm, George. Stephen King: America’s Best-Loved Boogeyman. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1998.

Bloom, Harold, editor. Stephen King. Updated ed., Chelsea House Publishers, 2007.

Breznican, Anthony. "Stephen King on His Shining Sequel." Entertainment Weekly, 11 Jan. 2013, ew.com/article/2013/01/11/stephen-king-his-shining-sequel/. Accessed 5 Aug. 2024.

Dorr, Russell. "Q&A: Russell Dorr, Stephen King's Researcher." Interview by Stephanie Klose. Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2013, p. 56. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=92752819&site=ehost-live. Accessed 15 Nov. 2017.

Herron, Don, editor. Reign of Fear: Fiction and Film of Stephen King. Underwood-Miller, 1988.

King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Berkley Books, 1981.

King, Stephen. Interview. By Andy Greene. Rolling Stone, 31 Oct. 2014, www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/stephen-king-the-rolling-stone-interview-20141031. Accessed 5 Aug. 2024.

King, Stephen. "How Stephen King Teaches Writing." Interview by Jessica Lahey. The Atlantic, 9 Sept. 2014, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/how-stephen-king-teaches-writing/379870/. Accessed 5 Aug. 2024.

King, Stephen. "Stephen King Knows Anti-Vaxxers Are Going to Hate His Latest Book: ‘Knock Yourself Out.’" Rolling Stone, 5 Sept. 2023, www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/stephen-king-interview-holly-anti-vaxxers-1234816605/. Accessed 5 Aug. 2024.

King, Stephen. "Stephen King's New Story Took Him 45 Years to Write." Interview by Mary Louise Kelly. NPR, 22 May 2024, www.npr.org/2024/05/22/1252772130/stephen-king-new-book-short-stories-you-like-it-darker. Accessed 5 Aug. 2024.

Magistrale, Tony. Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half. Twayne Publishers, 1992.

McAleer, Patrick. "I Have the Whole World in My Hands . . . Now What? Power, Control, Responsibility and the Baby Boomers in Stephen King's Fiction." The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 44, no. 6, 2011, pp. 1209–27, doi:10.1111/j.1540-5931.2011.00896.x. Accessed 15 Nov. 2017.

Reino, Joseph. Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary. Twayne Publishers, 1988.

Russell, Sharon A. Revisiting Stephen King: A Critical Companion. Greenwood Press, 2002.

Spignesi, Stephen J. The Essential Stephen King: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels, Short Stories, Movies, and Other Creations of the World's Most Popular Writer. New Page Books, 2001.

Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller, editors. Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King. New American Library, 1986.

Wiater, Stanley, et al. The Complete Stephen King Universe: A Guide to the Worlds of Stephen King. St. Martin's Griffin, 2006.