Stephen King facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Stephen King
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King in 2024
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| Born | Stephen Edwin King September 21, 1947 Portland, Maine, U.S. |
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| Occupation | Author |
| Alma mater | University of Maine (BA) |
| Period | 1967–present |
| Genre |
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| Spouse |
Tabitha Spruce
(m. 1971) |
| Children | 3, including Joe and Owen |
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Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author. Widely known for his horror novels, he has been crowned the "King of Horror". He has also explored other genres, among them suspense, crime, science-fiction, fantasy and mystery. Though known primarily for his novels, he has written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in collections.
His debut, Carrie (1974), established him in horror. Different Seasons (1982), a collection of four novellas, was his first major departure from the genre. Among the films adapted from King's fiction are Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), The Dead Zone and Christine (both 1983), Stand by Me (1986), Misery (1990), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Dolores Claiborne (1995), The Green Mile (1999), The Mist (2007) and It (2017). He has published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman and has co-written works with other authors, notably his friend Peter Straub and sons Joe Hill and Owen King. He has also written nonfiction, notably Danse Macabre (1981) and On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000).
Among other awards, King has won the O. Henry Award for "The Man in the Black Suit" (1994) and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller for 11/22/63 (2011). He has also won honors for his overall contributions to literature, including the 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2007 Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the 2014 National Medal of Arts. Joyce Carol Oates called King "a brilliantly rooted, psychologically 'realistic' writer for whom the American scene has been a continuous source of inspiration, and American popular culture a vast cornucopia of possibilities."
Contents
Early life and education
King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. His father, Donald Edwin King, a traveling vacuum salesman after returning from World War II, was born in Indiana with the surname Pollock, changing it to King as an adult. King's mother was Nellie Ruth King (née Pillsbury). His parents were married in Scarborough, Maine, on July 23, 1939. They lived with Donald's family in Chicago before moving to Croton-on-Hudson, New York. King's parents returned to Maine towards the end of World War II, living in a modest house in Scarborough. King is of Scots-Irish descent.
When King was two, his father left the family. His mother raised him and his older brother David by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. They moved from Scarborough and depended on relatives in Chicago, Illinois; Croton-on-Hudson; West De Pere, Wisconsin; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Malden, Massachusetts; and Stratford, Connecticut. When King was 11, his family moved to Durham, Maine, where his mother cared for her parents until their deaths. After that, she became a caregiver in a local residential facility for the mentally challenged.
In conversation with Terry Gross, King reflected that "I've been queried a lot about where I get my ideas or how I got interested in this stuff. And at some point, a lot of interviewers just turn into Dr. Freud and put me on the couch and say, what was your childhood like? And I say various things, and I confabulate a little bit and kind of dance around the question as best as I can, but bottom line - my childhood was pretty ordinary, except from a very early age, I wanted to be scared. I just did." He says he started writing when he was "about six or seven, just copying panels out of comic books and then making up my own stories... Film was also a major influence. I loved the movies from the start. So when I started to write, I had a tendency to write in images because that was all I knew at the time." King was a voracious reader in his youth: "I read everything from Nancy Drew to Psycho. My favorite was The Shrinking Man, by Richard Matheson — I was 8 when I found that." King recalls his sudden realization of what he wanted to do for a living: while browsing through an attic with his elder brother, he discovered a box of their father's books: "The box I found that day was a treasure trove of old Avon paperbacks... The pick of the litter, however, was an H. P. Lovecraft collection from 1947 called The Lurking Fear and Other Stories... I was on my way. Lovecraft—courtesy of my father—opened the way for me."
King recalls asking a bookmobile driver, "Do you have any stories about how kids really are?" She gave him Lord of the Flies. It proved formative: "It was, so far as I can remember, the first book with hands—strong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat. It said to me, 'This is not just entertainment; it's life or death.'... To me, Lord of the Flies has always represented what novels are for, why they are indispensable." King named his town of Castle Rock after the mountain fort in Lord of the Flies, and used a quotation from it as an epigraph to Hearts in Atlantis. King attended Durham Elementary School and entered Lisbon High School in Lisbon Falls, Maine, in 1962. King contributed to Dave's Rag, the newspaper his brother printed with a mimeograph machine, and later sold stories to his friends. His first independently published story was "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber", serialized over four issues of the fanzine Comics Review in 1965. He was a sports reporter for Lisbon's Weekly Enterprise, where his editor, John Gould, gave him some advice that stayed with him: "write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."
In 1966 King entered the University of Maine at Orono on a scholarship. While there he wrote for the student newspaper, The Maine Campus. Per Mark Singer, King "received solid encouragement from two professors, Edward Holmes and Burton Hatlen". King participated in a writing workshop organized by Hatlen, where he fell in love with Tabitha Spruce. King graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English, and his daughter Naomi Rachel was born that year. Stephen and Tabitha wed in 1971. In an afterward to his novel Lisey's Story, King paid tribute to Hatlen: “Burt was the greatest English teacher I ever had. It was he who first showed me the way to the pool, which he called ‘the language-pool, the myth-pool, where we all go down to drink.’ That was in 1968. I have trod the path that leads there often in the years since, and I can think of no better place to spend one’s days; the water is still sweet, and the fish still swim.”
Career
Beginnings
King sold his first professional short story, "The Glass Floor", to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967.
After graduating from the University of Maine, King earned a certificate to teach high school but, unable to find a teaching post immediately, he supplemented his laboring wage by selling short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier. Many of these early stories were republished in the collection Night Shift. The short story "The Raft" was published in Adam, a men's magazine. After being arrested for stealing traffic cones (he was annoyed after one of the cones knocked his muffler loose), he was fined $250 for petty larceny but had no money to pay. However, a check then arrived for "The Raft" (then titled "The Float"), and King cashed it to pay the fine. In 1971, 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. During 1966–1970, he wrote a draft about his dystopian novel called The Long Walk and the anti-war novel Sword in the Darkness, but neither of the works was published at the time; only The Long Walk was later released in 1979.
1970s: Carrie to The Dead Zone
King recalls the origin of his debut novel, Carrie: "Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together." It began as a short story intended for Cavalier, but King tossed the first three pages in the trash. His wife Tabitha recovered them and said she wanted to know what happened next; he followed her advice and expanded it into a novel. She told him: "You've got something here. I really think you do." When Carrie was chosen for publication in 1973, King's phone was out of service. Doubleday editor William Thompson sent King a telegram which read: "Carrie Officially A Doubleday Book. $2,500 Advance Against Royalties. Congrats, Kid – The Future Lies Ahead, Bill." Per The Guardian, Carrie "is the story of Carrie White, a high-school student with latent—and then, as the novel progresses, developing—telekinetic powers. It's brutal in places, affecting in others (Carrie's relationship with her almost hysterically religious mother being a particularly damaged one), and gory in even more." The review of Carrie in The New York Times noted that "King does more than tell a story. He is a schoolteacher himself, and he gets into Carrie’s mind as well as into the minds of her classmates. He also knows a thing or two about symbolism—blood symbolism especially."
King was teaching Dracula to high school students and wondered what would happen if Old World vampires came to a small New England town. This was the germ of 'Salem's Lot, which King called "Peyton Place meets Dracula". In two interviews in the 1980s, King called it his favorite of his novels. (He now calls Lisey's Story his favorite of his novels.) King's mother died from uterine cancer around the time 'Salem's Lot was published. After his mother's death, King and his family moved to Boulder, Colorado. He paid a visit to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park which provided the basis for The Shining, about a writer and his family taking care of a hotel for the winter. King's family returned to Auburn, Maine in 1975, where he completed The Stand, an apocalyptic novel about a pandemic and its aftermath. King recalls that it was the novel that took him the longest to write, and that it was "also the one my longtime readers still seem to like the best (there's something a little depressing about such a united opinion that you did your best work twenty years ago, but we won't go into that just now, thanks.)" In 1977, the Kings, with the addition of Owen Philip, their third and youngest child, traveled briefly to England. They returned to Maine that fall, and King began teaching creative writing at the University of Maine. The courses he taught on horror provided the basis for his first nonfiction book, Danse Macabre. In 1979, he published The Dead Zone, about an ordinary man gifted with second sight. It was the first of his novels to take place in Castle Rock, Maine.
1980s: Different Seasons to The Dark Half
In 1982, King published Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas with a more serious dramatic bent than the horror fiction for which he had become famous. Alan Cheuse wrote “Each of the first three novellas has its hypnotic moments, and the last one is a horrifying little gem.” Three of the four novellas were adapted as films: The Body as Stand by Me (1986); Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption as The Shawshank Redemption (1994); and Apt Pupil as the film of the same name (1998). The fourth, The Breathing Method, won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. King recalls "I got the best reviews in my life. And that was the first time that people thought, woah, this isn't really a horror thing."
In 1983, he published Christine, "A love triangle involving 17-year-old misfit Arnie Cunningham, his new girlfriend and a haunted 1958 Plymouth Fury." Later that year, he published Pet Sematary, which he had written in the late 1970s, when his family was living near a highway that "used up a lot of animals" as a neighbor put it. His daughter's cat was killed, and they buried it in a pet cemetery built by the local children. King imagined a burial ground beyond it that could bring the dead back to life, albeit imperfectly. He initially found it too disturbing to publish, but resurrected it to fulfill his contract with Doubleday.
In 1985, King published Skeleton Crew, a book of short fiction including "The Reach" and The Mist. He recalls: "I would be asked, 'What happened in your childhood that makes you want to write those terrible things?' I couldn't think of any real answer to that. And I thought to myself, 'Why don't you write a final exam on horror, and put in all the monsters that everyone was afraid of as a kid? Put in Frankenstein, the werewolf, the vampire, the mummy, the giant creatures that ate up New York in the old B movies. Put 'em all in there." These influences coalesced into It, about a shapeshifting monster that takes the form of its victims' fears and haunts the town of Derry, Maine. He said he thought he was done writing about monsters, and wanted to "bring on all the monsters one last time…and call it It." It won the August Derleth Award in 1987.
In 1987, he published the fantasy The Eyes of the Dragon, which he originally wrote for his daughter. That same year, he published Misery, about Paul Sheldon, a popular writer who is injured in a car wreck and held captive by Annie Wilkes, his self-described "number-one fan". King recalls that "Paul Sheldon turned out to be a good deal more resourceful than I initially thought, and his efforts to play Scheherazade and save his life gave me a chance to say some things about the redemptive power of writing I had long felt but never articulated." Misery shared the inaugural Bram Stoker Award with Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon. Later in 1987 he published The Tommyknockers, "a forties-style science fiction tale". Two years later, he published The Dark Half, about an author whose literary alter-ego takes on a life of his own. In the author's note, King writes that "I am indebted to the late Richard Bachman."
1990s: Four Past Midnight to Hearts in Atlantis
In 1990, King published Four Past Midnight, a collection of four novellas. In 1991, he published Needful Things, his first novel since achieving sobriety, billed as "The Last Castle Rock Story". In 1992, he published Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne, two novels about women loosely linked by a solar eclipse. The latter novel is narrated by the title character in an unbroken monologue; Mark Singer described it as "a morally riveting confession from the earthy mouth of a sixty-six-year-old Maine coastal-island native with a granite-hard life but not a grain of self-pity". King said he based the character of Claiborne on his mother.
In 1996, King published The Green Mile, the story of a death row inmate, as a serial novel. In 1998, King published of Bag of Bones, about a recently widowed novelist, billed as "A Haunted Love Story". The book was well-received, with The Denver Post calling it "the finest he's written". Charles de Lint wrote that it showed King's maturation as a writer: "He hasn't forsaken the spookiness and scares that have made him a brand name, but he uses them more judiciously now... The present-day King has far more insight into the human condition than did his younger self, and better yet, all the skills required to share it with us." Bag of Bones won the Bram Stoker and August Derleth Awards. In 1999, he published Hearts in Atlantis, a book of linked novellas and short stories about coming of age in the 1960s.
In 1999, King was hospitalized after being hit by a van. Reflecting on the incident, King wrote "it occurs to me that I have nearly been killed by a character out of one of my own novels. It's almost funny." He said his nurses were "told in no uncertain terms, don't make any Misery jokes".
2000s: On Writing to Under the Dome
In 2000, King published On Writing, a mix of memoir and style manual which The Wall Street Journal called "a one-of-a-kind classic". Later that year he published Riding the Bullet, "the world's first mass e-book, with more than 500,000 downloads". Inspired by its success, he began publishing an epistolary horror novel, The Plant, in online installments using the pay what you want method. He suggested readers pay $1 per installment, and said he'd only continue publishing if 75% of readers paid. When The Plant folded, the public assumed that King had abandoned the project because sales were unsuccessful, but King later said he had simply run out of stories. The unfinished novel is still available from King's official site, now free. He predicted that e-books would become 50% of the market "probably by 2013 and maybe by 2012". He added that: "Here's the thing—people tire of the new toys quickly." King wrote the first draft of Dreamcatcher (2001) with a notebook and a Waterman fountain pen, which he called "the world's finest word processor".
In 2002, King published From a Buick 8, a return to the territory of Christine. In 2005, he published the mystery The Colorado Kid for the Hard Case Crime imprint. In 2006, he published Cell, in which a mysterious signal broadcast over cell phones turns users into mindless killers. King noted in the book's introduction that he does not use cell phones. That same year, he published Lisey's Story, about the widow of a novelist. He calls it his favorite of his novels, because "I've always felt that marriage creates its own secret world, and only in a long marriage can two people at least approach real knowledge about each other. I wanted to write about that, and felt that I actually got close to what I really wanted to say." In 2007, King served as guest editor for the annual anthology The Best American Short Stories.
In 2008, King published Duma Key, his first novel set in Florida, and the collection Just After Sunset. In 2009, it was announced he would serve as a writer for Fangoria. King's novel Under the Dome was published later that year, and debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times Bestseller List. Janet Maslin said of it, "Hard as this thing is to hoist, it's even harder to put down."
2010s: Full Dark, No Stars to The Institute
In 2010, King published Full Dark, No Stars, a collection of four novellas with the common theme of retribution. In 2011, King published 11/22/63, about a time portal leading to 1958, and an English teacher who travels through it to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. Errol Morris called it "one of the best time travel stories since H. G. Wells". In 2013, King published Joyland, his second book for the Hard Case Crime imprint. Later that year, he published Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining.
During his Chancellor's Speaker Series talk at University of Massachusetts Lowell on December 7, 2012, King said that he was writing a crime novel about a retired policeman being taunted by a murderer, with the working title Mr. Mercedes. In an interview with Parade, King confirmed that the novel was "more or less" completed; he published it in 2014. The novel won the Edgar Award in 2015. He returned to horror with Revival, which he called "a nasty, dark piece of work". King announced in June 2014 that Mr. Mercedes is part of a trilogy; the second book, Finders Keepers, was published in 2015. The third book of the trilogy, End of Watch, was released in 2016. In 2018, he released The Outsider, which features the character Holly Gibney, and the novella Elevation. In 2019, he released The Institute.
2020s: If It Bleeds to present
In 2020, King released If It Bleeds, a collection of four novellas. In 2021, he published Later, his third book for Hard Case Crime. In 2022, King released the novel Fairy Tale. Holly, about Holly Gibney was released in September 2023. In November 2023, the short story collection You Like It Darker, featuring twelve stories (seven previously published and five unreleased) was published by Scribner in May 2024. The book debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times fiction best-seller list for the week ending May 25, 2024. King announced an upcoming novel named Never Flinch on November 18, 2024. The novel is set to release on May 27, 2025.
Pseudonyms
King published five short novels—Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man (1982) and Thinner (1984)—under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. He explains: "I did that because back in the early days of my career there was a feeling in the publishing business that one book a year was all the public would accept...eventually the public got wise to this because you can change your name but you can't really disguise your style." Bachman's surname is derived from the band Bachman–Turner Overdrive and his first name is a nod to Richard Stark, the pseudonym Donald E. Westlake used to publish his darker work. The Bachman books are grittier than King's usual fare; King called his alter-ego "Dark-toned, despairing...not a very nice guy." A Literary Guild member praised Thinner as "what Stephen King would write like if Stephen King could really write."
Bachman was exposed as King's pseudonym in 1985 by Steve Brown, a Washington, D.C. bookstore clerk who noticed stylistic similarities between King and Bachman and located publisher's records at the Library of Congress that named King as the author of Rage. King announced Bachman's death from "cancer of the pseudonym". King reflected that "Richard Bachman began his career not as a delusion but as a sheltered place where I could publish a few early books which I felt readers might like. Then he began to grow and come alive, as the creatures of a writer's imagination so frequently do... He took on his own reality, that's all, and when his cover was blown, he died." Originally, King planned Misery to be released under the pseudonym before his identity was discovered.
When Desperation (1996) was released, the companion novel The Regulators was published as a "discovered manuscript" by Bachman. In 2006, King announced that he had discovered another Bachman novel, Blaze, which was published the following year. The original manuscript had been held at the University of Maine for many years and had been covered by numerous King experts. King rewrote the original 1973 manuscript for its publication.
King has used other pseudonyms. In 1972, the short story "The Fifth Quarter" was published under the name John Swithen (a Carrie character) in Cavalier. Charlie the Choo-Choo: From the World of The Dark Tower was published in 2016 under the pseudonym Beryl Evans and illustrated by Ned Dameron. It is adapted from a fictional book central to the plot of King's The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands.
The Dark Tower
In the late 1970s, King began a series about a lone gunslinger, Roland, who pursues the "Man in Black" in an alternate universe that is a cross between J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth and the American Wild West as depicted by Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone in their spaghetti Westerns. The first story, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, was initially published in five installments in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction under the editorship of Edward L. Ferman, from 1977 to 1981. It grew into an eight-volume epic, The Dark Tower, published between 1978 and 2012.
Collaborations
Literature
King co-wrote two novels with Peter Straub, The Talisman (1984) and Black House (2001). Straub recalls that "We tried to make it as difficult as possible for readers to identify who wrote what. Eventually, we were able to successfully imitate each other's style... Steve threw in more commas or clauses, and I kind of made things more simple in sentence structure. And I tried to make things as vivid as I could because Steve is just fabulous at that, and also I tried to write more colloquially." Straub said the only person who could correctly identify who wrote which passages was a fellow author, Neil Gaiman.
King and the photographer f-stop Fitzgerald collaborated on the coffee table book Nightmares in the Sky: Gargoyles and Grotesques (1988). He produced an artist's book with designer Barbara Kruger, My Pretty Pony (1989), published in a limited edition of 250 by the Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Alfred A. Knopf released it in a general trade edition.
King co-wrote Throttle (2009) with his son Joe Hill. The novella is an homage to Richard Matheson's "Duel". Their second collaboration, In the Tall Grass (2012), was published in two parts in Esquire. King and his son Owen co-wrote Sleeping Beauties (2018), set in a West Virginia women's prison. King and Richard Chizmar co-wrote Gwendy's Button Box (2017). A sequel, Gwendy's Magic Feather (2019), was a solo effort by Chizmar. In 2022, King and Chizmar rejoined forces for Gwendy's Final Task.
Film and television
King made his screenwriting debut with George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982), a tribute to EC horror comics. In 1985, he wrote another horror anthology film, Cat's Eye. Rob Reiner, whose film Stand by Me (1986) is an adaptation of King's novella The Body, named his production company Castle Rock Entertainment after King's fictional town. Castle Rock Entertainment would produce other King adaptations, including Reiner's Misery (1990) and Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption (1994).
In 1986, King made his directorial debut with Maximum Overdrive, an adaptation of his story "Trucks". He recalls: "I was coked out of my mind all through its production, and really didn't know what I was doing." It was neither a critical nor a commercial success; King was nominated for a Golden Raspberry for Worst Director, but lost to Prince, for Under the Cherry Moon.
In the 1990s, King wrote several miniseries: Golden Years (1991), The Stand (1994), The Shining (1997) and Storm of the Century (1999). He wrote the miniseries Rose Red (2002); The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red (2001) was written by Ridley Pearson and published anonymously as a tie-in for the series. He also developed Kingdom Hospital (2004), based on Lars von Trier's The Kingdom.
Music and theater
King collaborated with Stan Winston and Mick Garris on the music video Michael Jackson's Ghosts (1996). He co-wrote the musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County (2012) with T. Bone Burnett and John Mellencamp. A soundtrack album was released, featuring Taj Mahal, Elvis Costello and Rosanne Cash, among others.
Comics
In 1985, King wrote a few pages of the benefit X-Men comic book Heroes for Hope Starring the X-Men. He wrote the introduction to Batman No. 400, an anniversary issue where he expressed his preference for the character over Superman. In 2010, DC Comics premiered American Vampire, a comic book series co-written by King and Scott Snyder and illustrated by Rafael Albuquerque. King wrote the backstory of the first American vampire, Skinner Sweet, in the first five-issues story arc.
Style, themes and influences
Style
In his memoir On Writing, King recalls:
"When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer (Mark Singer) that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn't believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. And I do. Stories aren't souvenir tee-shirts or GameBoys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small, a seashell. Sometimes it's enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.
Joyce Carol Oates called King "both a storyteller and an inventor of startling images and metaphors, which linger long in the memory." An example of King's imagery is seen in The Body when the narrator recalls a childhood clubhouse with a tin roof and rusty screen door: "No matter what time of day you looked out that screen door, it looked like sunset... When it rained, being inside the club was like being inside a Jamaican steel drum." King writes that "The use of simile and other figurative language is one of the chief delights of fiction—reading it and writing it, as well. When it's on target, a simile delights us in much the same way meeting an old friend in a crowd of strangers does. By comparing two seemingly unrelated objects—a restaurant bar and a cave, a mirror and a mirage—we are sometimes able to see an old thing in a new and vivid way. Even if the result is mere clarity instead of beauty, I think writer and reader are participating together in a kind of miracle. Maybe that's drawing it a little strong, but yeah—it's what I believe."
Themes
When asked if fear was his main subject, King said "In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that's inexplicable to you, whether it's the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we're still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts."
King often uses authors as characters, such as Ben Mears in 'Salem's Lot, Jack Torrance in The Shining, adult Bill Denbrough in It, and Mike Noonan in Bag of Bones. He has extended this to breaking the fourth wall by including himself as a character in three novels of The Dark Tower. Among other things, this allows King to explore themes of authorship; George Stade writes that Misery "is a parable in chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his audience, which holds him prisoner and dictates what he writes, on pain of death" while The Dark Half "is a parable in chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his creative genius, the vampire within him, the part of him that only awakes to raise Cain when he writes."
Joyce Carol Oates said that "Stephen King’s characteristic subject is small-town American life, often set in fictitious Derry, Maine; tales of family life, marital life, the lives of children banded together by age, circumstance, and urgency, where parents prove oblivious or helpless. The human heart in conflict with itself—in the guise of the malevolent Other. The 'gothic' imagination magnifies the vicissitudes of 'real life' in order to bring it into a sharper and clearer focus." King's The Body is about coming of age, a theme he'd return to several times, for example in Joyland.
Introducing King at the National Book Awards, Walter Mosley said "Stephen King once said that daily life is the frame that makes the picture. His commitment, as I see it, is to celebrate and empower the everyday man and woman as they buy aspirin and cope with cancer. He takes our daily lives and makes them into something heroic. He takes our world, validates our distrust of it and then helps us to see that there’s a chance to transcend the muck. He tells us that even if we fail in our struggles, we are still worthy enough to pass on our energies in the survival of humanity." In his speech accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, King said: "Frank Norris, the author of McTeague, said something like this: 'What should I care if they, i.e., the critics, single me out for sneers and laughter? I never truckled, I never lied. I told the truth.' And that’s always been the bottom line for me. The story and the people in it may be make believe but I need to ask myself over and over if I’ve told the truth about the way real people would behave in a similar situation."
Influences
In On Writing, King says "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all: read a lot and write a lot." He emphasizes the importance of good description, which "begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary. I began learning my lessons in this regard by reading Chandler, Hammett, and Ross Macdonald; I gained perhaps even more respect for the power of compact, descriptive language from reading T. S. Eliot (those ragged claws scuttling across the ocean floor; those coffee spoons), and William Carlos Williams (white chickens, red wheelbarrow, the plums that were in the ice box, so sweet and so cold)."
King has called Richard Matheson "the author who influenced me most". Other influences include Ray Bradbury, James M. Cain, Jack Finney, Joseph Payne Brennan, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, Don Robertson and Thomas Williams. King often pays homage to classic horror stories by retelling them in a modern context. He recalls that while writing 'Salem's Lot, "I decided I wanted to try to use the book partially as a form of literary homage (as Peter Straub had done in Ghost Story, working in the tradition of such 'classical' ghost story writers as Henry James, M. R. James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.) So my novel bears an intentional similarity to Bram Stoker's Dracula, and after a while it began to seem I was playing an interesting—to me, at least—game of literary racquet-ball: 'Salem's Lot itself was the ball and Dracula was the wall I kept hitting it against, watching to see how and where it could bounce, so I could hit it again. As a matter of fact, it took some pretty interesting bounces, and I ascribe this mostly to the fact that, while my ball existed in the twentieth century, the wall was very much a product of the nineteenth." Similarly, King's Revival is a modern riff on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. King dedicated it to "the people who built my house": Shelley, Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, Fritz Leiber, August Derleth, Shirley Jackson, Robert Bloch, Straub and Arthur Machen, "whose short novel The Great God Pan has haunted me all my life".
In J. Peder Zane's The Top Ten: Authors Pick Their Favorite Books, King chose The Golden Argosy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Satanic Verses, McTeague, Lord of the Flies, Bleak House, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Raj Quartet, Light in August and Blood Meridian. He provided an appreciation for The Golden Argosy, a collection of short stories featuring Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and others. He recalls that "I first found The Golden Argosy in a Lisbon Falls (Maine) bargain barn called the Jolly White Elephant, where it was on offer for $2.25. At that time I only had four dollars, and spending over half of it on one book, even a hardcover, was a tough decision. I've never regretted it." He calls it "an amazing resource for readers and writers, a treasury in every sense of the word... The Golden Argosy taught me more about good writing than all the writing classes I've ever taken. It was the best $2.25 I ever spent." In 2022, he provided another list of ten favorite books; Lord of the Flies, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Blood Meridian remained, and he added Ship of Fools, The Orphan Master's Son, Invisible Man, Watership Down, The Hair of Harold Roux, American Pastoral and The Lord of the Rings. He added, "Although Anthony Powell's novels should probably be on here, especially the sublimely titled Casanova's Chinese Restaurant and Books Do Furnish a Room. And Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. And at least six novels by Patricia Highsmith. And what about Patrick O'Brian? See how hard this is to do?"
Views and activism
King was raised Methodist, but lost his belief in organized religion while in high school. While not conventionally religious, he says he chooses to believe in God.
In 1984, King endorsed Gary Hart's presidential campaign.
King at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany, 2013During the 2008 presidential election, King endorsed Barack Obama.
On March 8, 2011, King spoke at a political rally in Sarasota aimed against Governor Rick Scott (R-FL), voicing his opposition to the Tea Party movement.
On April 30, 2012, King published an article in The Daily Beast calling for rich Americans, including himself, to pay more taxes, citing it as "a practical necessity and moral imperative that those who have received much should be obligated to pay ... in the same proportion".
On January 25, 2013, King published an essay titled Guns via Amazon.com's Kindle single feature, which discusses the gun debate. King called for gun owners to support a ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons, writing, "Autos and semi-autos are weapons of mass destruction...When lunatics want to make war on the unarmed and unprepared, these are the weapons they use." The essay became the fifth-bestselling nonfiction title for the Kindle.
In 2016, King was one of many writers who signed a letter condemning the candidacy of Donald Trump.
In the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, King endorsed Elizabeth Warren's campaign. Warren eventually suspended her campaign, and King later endorsed Joe Biden's campaign in the 2020 general election.
King testified in an August 2022 in a case brought by the U.S. Justice Department to block a $2.2 billion merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster (two of the "Big Five" book publishers). The New York Times credited King's high-profile testimony, which was against his own publisher, with helping to convince presiding judge Florence Y. Pan with ultimately blocking the merger.
Philanthropy
King has stated that he donates approximately $4 million per year "to libraries, local fire departments that need updated lifesaving equipment (Jaws of Life tools are always a popular request), schools, and a scattering of organisations that underwrite the arts."
The Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, chaired by King and his wife, ranks sixth among Maine charities in terms of average annual giving with over $2.8 million in grants per year, according to The Grantsmanship Center.
In November 2011, the STK Foundation donated $70,000 in matched funding via his radio station to help pay the heating bills for families in need in his home town of Bangor, Maine, during the winter.
In February 2021, King's Foundation donated $6,500 to help children from the Farwell Elementary School in Lewiston, Maine, to publish two novels on which they had been working over the course of several prior years, before being stopped due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Maine.
Personal life
King's home in BangorAfter meeting while studying at the University of Maine, King married Tabitha Spruce on January 2, 1971. She is also a novelist and philanthropist. She has been supportive of him throughout his career, even rescuing his early manuscript of Carrie from the trash when he doubted himself. They own and divide their time between three houses: one in Bangor, Maine, one in Lovell, Maine, and for the winter a waterfront mansion located off the Gulf of Mexico in Sarasota, Florida. King's home in Bangor has been described as an unofficial tourist attraction, and as of 2019[update], the couple plan to convert it into a facility housing his archives and a writers' retreat.
The Kings have three children—two sons and a daughter, Naomi (born June 1, 1970), who is a Unitarian Universalist Church minister in Plantation, Florida, with their partner, Thandeka. Both of King's sons are also professional authors: Owen King (born February 21, 1977) published his first collection of stories, We're All in This Together: A Novella and Stories, in 2005. Joseph Hillström King (born June 4, 1972), who writes as Joe Hill, published his first collection of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts, in 2005.
King wearing a Boston Red Sox jersey at a book signing in November 2004King is a longtime fan of baseball, particularly the Boston Red Sox. In 1990, King published an essay about Owen's Little League team in The New Yorker. King and Stewart O'Nan coauthored Faithful, a chronicle of their correspondence about the historic 2004 Boston Red Sox season which culminated in the Sox winning the 2004 World Series. The game features in King's novellas The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) and Blockade Billy (2010).
Music, particularly rock, plays a role in much of King's work. On the BBC program Desert Island Discs, King's number one choice was Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row". On another BBC program, Paperback Writers, he made new selections, among them AC/DC's "Stiff Upper Lip", Danny & the Juniors's "At the Hop" and Creedence Clearwater Revival's "It Came Out of the Sky". He played guitar for the Rock Bottom Remainders, a charity supergroup whose members included Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, Dave Barry, Scott Turow, James McBride, Mitch Albom, Roy Blount, Jr., Matt Groening, Greg Iles, Kathi Kamen Goldmark and other authors. They released an album, Stranger Than Fiction (1998), under Goldmark's label, Don't Quit Your Day Job Records. King and his band-mates coauthored Midlife Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America With Three Chords and an Attitude (1994) and the e-book Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All (2013). King's favorite books about music are Greil Marcus's Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces and Chris Willman's Rednecks and Bluenecks.
King and his wife own the Zone Corporation, a radio station group established in 1983 to acquire WACZ in Bangor, which was renamed WZON. Two additional stations, WKIT-FM and WNSW in Brewer, were added in 1995; WNSW was quickly closed down. A third station, WDME-FM in Dover-Foxcroft (later renamed WZLO), was acquired in 2001. In December 2024, King announced that the stations would shut down at the end of the year. He cited his advancing age and financial losses from the stations as reasons for the closure. Ahead of the planned closure, King reached a deal to sell WKIT to two Bangor businessmen; WZON and WZLO remain slated for closure.
King remains a voracious reader. In J. Peder Zane's The Top Ten: Authors Pick Their Favorite Books, King chose The Golden Argosy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Satanic Verses, McTeague, Lord of the Flies, Bleak House, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Raj Quartet, Light in August and Blood Meridian. In 2022, he provided another list of ten favorite books; Lord of the Flies, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Blood Meridian remained, and he added Ship of Fools, The Orphan Master's Son, Invisible Man, Watership Down, The Hair of Harold Roux, American Pastoral and The Lord of the Rings. He added, "Although Anthony Powell's novels should probably be on here, especially the sublimely titled Casanova's Chinese Restaurant and Books Do Furnish a Room. And Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. And at least six novels by Patricia Highsmith. And what about Patrick O'Brian? See how hard this is to do?"
When asked about his reading habits, King replied, "I'm sort of an omnivore, apt to go from the latest John Sandford to D. H. Lawrence to Cormac McCarthy." When asked what books we'd be surprised to find on his shelves, he answered "Poetry, maybe? I love Anne Sexton, Richard Wilbur, W. B. Yeats. The poetry I come back to again and again are the narrative poems of Stephen Dobyns." When asked which novel he comes back to, he named Thomas Williams's The Hair of Harold Roux. When asked who his favorite novelist is, he said "Probably Don Robertson, author of Paradise Falls, The Ideal, Genuine Man and the marvelously titled Miss Margaret Ridpath and the Dismantling of the Universe. What I appreciate most in novels and novelists is generosity, a complete baring of the heart and mind, and Robertson always did that. He also wrote the best single line I've ever read in a novel: Of a funeral he wrote, 'There were that day, o Lord, squadrons of birds.'"
Car accident and aftermath
On June 19, 1999, at about 4:30 p.m., King was walking on the shoulder of Maine State Route 5, in Lovell, Maine. Driver Bryan Edwin 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 (four meters) from the pavement of Route 5. Early reports at the time from Oxford County Sheriff deputy Matt Baker claimed King was hit from behind. Smith was later arrested and charged with driving to endanger and aggravated assault. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of driving to endanger and was sentenced to six months in county jail (suspended) and had his driving license suspended for a year. In his book On Writing, King states he was heading north, walking against the traffic. Shortly before the accident took place, a woman in a car, also northbound, passed King first followed by a light blue Dodge van. The van was looping from one side of the road to the other, and the woman told her passenger she hoped "that guy in the van doesn't hit him".
King was conscious enough to give the deputy phone numbers to contact his family but was in considerable pain. He was transported to Northern Cumberland Hospital in Bridgton and then flown by air ambulance to Central Maine Medical Center (CMMC) in Lewiston. ..... His leg bones were so shattered that doctors initially considered amputating his leg but stabilized the bones in the leg with an external fixator. After five operations in 10 days and physical therapy, King resumed work on On Writing in July, though his hip was still shattered and he could sit for only about 40 minutes before the pain became unbearable.
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, to King's disappointment, as he had fantasized about smashing it.
Appearances in other media
In The Princess Bride, William Goldman writes that Stephen King is "doing the abridgment" of the fictional book Buttercup's Baby. King explains this is an inside joke from Goldman, "who's an old friend. He's done the screen adaptations for a number of my novels. He did Misery, Dreamcatcher and he also did Hearts in Atlantis, and although he's not credited, he worked on Dolores Claiborne as well, so Bill and I go back a long way. I admired his books before I ever met him and as a kind of return tip of the cap, he put me in that book The Princess Bride."
In 1988, the band Blue Öyster Cult recorded an updated version of its 1974 song "Astronomy"; the single released for radio play featured a narrative intro spoken by King. In 2012, King provided the narration for Shooter Jennings's album Black Ribbons. King was a contestant on Celebrity Jeopardy! in 1995 and 1998. He's made cameos in adaptations of his work, and appeared as the character Bachman on Sons of Anarchy; the name is a nod to his pseudonym Richard Bachman. He voiced himself in The Simpsons episode "Insane Clown Poppy", where he appears with fellow authors Amy Tan, John Updike and Tom Wolfe at a book fair. King tells Marge he is taking a break from horror to write a biography of Benjamin Franklin.
Awards and honors
- August Derleth Award, awarded by the British Fantasy Society
- 1981: Special Award
- 1982: Cujo'
- 1987: It
- 1999: Bag of Bones
- 2005: The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
- British Fantasy Award For Best Short Fiction
- 1983: "The Breathing Method"
- Balrog Award Best Collection / Anthology 1980: Night Shift
- Black Quill Award Best Dark Genre Novel 2009: Duma Key
- Bram Stoker Award, awarded by the Horror Writers Association
- Best Novel
- 1987: Misery.
- 1996: The Green Mile
- 1998: Bag of Bones
- 2006: Lisey's Story
- 2008: Duma Key
- 2013: Doctor Sleep
- Best Fiction Collection
- 1990: Four Past Midnight
- 2009: Just After Sunset
- 2011: Full Dark, No Stars
- Best Short Fiction
- 1995: "Lunch at the Gotham Café"
- 2000: "Riding the Bullet"
- 2011:"Herman Wouk is Still Alive"
- Best Non-Fiction
- 2000: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
- 2002: Lifetime Achievement Award
- Edgar Award for Best Novel, awarded by the Mystery Writers of America
- 2015: Mr. Mercedes
- Mystery Writers of America 2007 Grand Master Award
- 1982 Hugo Award for Best Related Work: Danse Macabre
- International Horror Guild Awards
- 1999: Storm of the Century
- 2003: Living Legend
- Locus Awards
- 1982: Danse Macabre
- 1986: Skeleton Crew
- 1997: Desperation
- 1999: Bag of Bones
- 2001: On Writing
- 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
- 2014 National Medal of Arts
- National Magazine Awards
- 2004: "Rest Stop"
- 2013: "Batman and Robin Have an Altercation"
- 1996 O. Henry Award "The Man in the Black Suit"
- 2005 Quill Award for Faithful (with Stewart O'Nan)
- 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for "Morality"
- Spokane Public Library Golden Pen Award 1986: Golden Pen Award
- University of Maine 1980: Alumni Career Award
- World Fantasy Award
- 1980: Convention Award
- 1982: "Do the Dead Sing?"
- 1995: "The Man in the Black Suit"
- 2004: Lifetime Achievement
- 1992 World Horror Convention : World Horror Grandmaster
- 1997 Writers For Writers Award, awarded by Poets & Writers Magazine
Carrie was included on the New York Public Library's list of Books of the Century under the category "Pop Culture Mass & Entertainment". In 2008, On Writing was ranked 21st on Entertainment Weekly's list of "The New Classics: The 100 Best Reads from 1983 to 2008". It also made Time's list of the 100 greatest nonfiction books published since the magazine's founding in 1923. Gilbert Cruz wrote, "it's the most practical and unpretentious writer's manual around—as practical and unpretentious as its author, who, yes, just happens to be one of the world's most famous novelists."
11/22/63 (2011) was named one of the five best fiction books of the year in The New York Times: "Throughout his career, King has explored fresh ways to blend the ordinary and the supernatural. His new novel imagines a time portal in a Maine diner that lets an English teacher go back to 1958 in an effort to stop Lee Harvey Oswald and—rewardingly for readers—also allows King to reflect on questions of memory, fate and free will as he richly evokes midcentury America. The past guards its secrets, this novel reminds us, and the horror behind the quotidian is time itself."
Filmography
Year Title Director Executive producer Writer Actor Notes 1981 Knightriders No No No Yes Role: Hoagie Man 1982 Creepshow No No Yes Yes Role: Jordy Verrill 1983 The Dead Zone No No Yes No 1985 Cat's Eye No No Yes No 1985 Silver Bullet No No Yes No 1986 Maximum Overdrive Yes No Yes Yes Role: Man at Bank ATM 1987 Creepshow 2 No No No Yes Role: Truck Driver 1987 Tales from the Darkside No No Yes No 1 episode: "Sorry, Right Number" 1989 Pet Sematary No No Yes Yes Role: Minister 1991 Golden Years No Yes Yes Yes Miniseries, also created by King, role: Bus Driver 1992 Sleepwalkers No No Yes Yes Role: Cemetery Caretaker 1994 The Stand No Yes Yes Yes Miniseries, role: Teddy Weizak 1995 The Langoliers No No No Yes Miniseries, role: Tom Holby 1996 Thinner No No No Yes Role: Pharmacist 1997 The Shining No Yes Yes Yes Miniseries, role: Gage Creed 1998 The X-Files No No Yes No 1 episode: "Chinga" 1999 Storm of the Century No Yes Yes Yes Miniseries, role: Lawyer in Ad / Reporter on Broken TV 1999 Frasier No No No Yes 1 episode: "Mary Christmas", role: Brian 2000 The Simpsons No No No Yes 1 episode: "Insane Clown Poppy", role: Himself 2002 Rose Red No Yes Yes Yes Miniseries, role: Pizza Delivery Guy 2003 The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer No Yes No No TV film 2004 Kingdom Hospital No Yes Yes Yes 9 episodes, also developed by King, role: Johnny B. Goode 2004 Riding the Bullet No Yes No No 2005 Fever Pitch No No No Yes Role: Stephen King 2005 Gotham Cafe No No No Yes Short film, role: Mr. Ring 2006 Desperation No Yes Yes No TV film 2007 Diary of the Dead No No No Yes Role: Newsreader (voice, uncredited) 2010 Sons of Anarchy No No No Yes 1 episode: "Caregiver", role: Bachman 2012 Stuck in Love No No No Yes Role: Stephen King (voice) 2014 Under the Dome No Yes Yes Yes 1 episode: "Heads Will Roll", role: Diner Patron 2014 A Good Marriage No No Yes No 2016 11.22.63 No Yes No No 2016 Cell No No Yes No 2017 Mr. Mercedes No Yes No Yes Role: Diner Patron 2018 Castle Rock No Yes No No 2019 It Chapter Two No No No Yes Role: Shopkeeper 2021 Lisey's Story No Yes Yes No Miniseries See also
In Spanish: Stephen King para niños
- List of adaptations of works by Stephen King
- Castle Rock (Stephen King)
- Charles Scribner's Sons (aka Scribner)
- Derry (Stephen King)
- Dollar Baby
- Jerusalem's Lot (Stephen King)
- Haven
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