Stephen King has been quite aptly given the title, Master of Horror. Furthermore, his works have been translated into 33 different languages and published in over 35 countries. There are over 300 million copies of his novels in publication. He lives at his Bangor residence in Maine, along with his wife, where he writes from his home.
In June of 1999, Stephen King was severely injured in an accident, which left him in a critical condition. He sustained lung injuries, had broken ribs, a broken leg, and a severely fractured hip. He was operated upon for three weeks at the Central Maine Medical Center in Bangor, before being released. He continued to be bedridden and required intensive rehabilitation over the remainder of the year. Due to his injuries, his ongoing projects were delayed by at least a year.
Another interesting side of the writer of macabre are the bit parts that he has played in movies of his stories. Having been inspired by the cameos of Alfred Hitchcock in movie features of his own works, Stephen decided to put his college dramatic society experience to use, and took to making guest appearances in several of his own movies.
Here are the roles he has played in the movies.
Hoagie Man – Knightriders (Directed by George Romero) (1981)
Jordy Verril/Truck driver – Creepshow (1982)
Guy swearing at ATM – Maximum Overdrive (1986)
Truck driver - Creepshow II
The priest – Pet Sematary (1989)
Bus driver – Golden Years (1991)
Cemetery caretaker – Sleepwalkers (1992)
Teddy Weizak – Boarder guard/Nadine’s ride – The Stand (1994)
Tom Holby – Head Chairman of the Board – The Langoliers (1995)
Dr. Bangor – Pharmacist – Thinner (1986)
Band Leader – The Shining (May 1997)
Stephen King is of Scot–Irish ancestry, his height is 6’4", and he weighs around 200 pounds. He has blue eyes, fair skin, with thick black hair. His beard has a frost of white; he keeps his beard between the end of the World Series and the opening of baseball practice in Florida. Occasionally, he keeps a moustache. He has worn glasses ever since he was a child. He lives with his wife, Tabitha, and their three children: Naomi Rachel, Joe Hill, and Owen Phillip in Center Lovell, Maine.
Stephen King’s philanthropic nature is evident from the fact that The American Cancer Society receives frequent contributions from him. Moreover, he also provides scholarships for local high school students through the Hampden Academy, and is also a regular donor to local and national charities.
Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. He was the second son of Donald Edwin King and NellieRuth Pillsbury King. When Stephen was a toddler of two years, his father stepped out one night for cigarettes and never returned. Stephen and his elder brother, David, who was adopted two years before Stephen’s birth, were raised by their mother. Part of his childhood was spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father’s family resided at that time, and also in Stratford, Connecticut.
Stephen and David often visited members of their mother’s family in Malden, Massachusetts, and Pownal, Maine.
Stephen was just 11, when Ruth King decided to permanently shift to Durham, Maine. Ruth’s parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth’s sisters persuaded her to take over the physical care of the elderly couple. Other members of the family provided a small house in Durham and the necessary financial support. After Stephen’s grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found a job in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the retarded.
Writing came early to Stephen. He wrote the first of his short stories when he was just seven. His first touch with terror was when he watched the movie Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, but this young bespectacled boy found his true calling when he discovered, in his aunt’s attic, a box of science fiction and horror books in 1959. The books belonged to his father once and they were works of authors like Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and Matheson. He collaborated with his friend, Chris Chesley, to publish a collection of short tales with the help of a cyclostyle. The same year, he and his brother David, decided to publish their own local town newspaper named Dave’s Rag. They accomplished this with a mimeograph David had bought, and they managed to roll out a paper that sold for five cents an issue. Stephen managed to have his first story published in 1965. This story was I Was A Teenage Grave Robber which was published in Comics Review, but his first professional sale was in 1967 with the story, The Glass Floor. It was a story about a haunted house with a secret library which had a floor made of glass which gave the person the illusion of floating and then the person would fall to his doom. He got just thirty dollars for this story.
Stephen graduated in 1966 from Lisbon Falls High School, having attended the grammar school in Durham earlier. In high school, King played football and had also joined a local band. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, The Maine Campus. His corner in the school paper, called King’s Garbage Truck, published not only tales but also general articles. King was also active in student politics, serving as member of the student senate. He supported the anti-war movement on the Orono Campus. He concluded from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He eventually graduated from the University of Maine in 1970, with a Bachelor of Science degree in English and was qualified to teach at the high school level.
On post-graduation, a draft board examination immediately found him unfit on grounds of limited vision, flat feet, high blood pressure, and punctured ear-drums.
In the Fogler library at the University of Maine, he met the girl he was going to marry. He and Tabitha Jane Spruce married in January1971. As he was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, Stephen and Tabitha had to live on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan plus savings. He also worked at a filling station which earned him a few more dollars and a short story sale to men’s magazines would be an occasional boost to Stephen’s shoestring earnings. Stephen's first short story sale after his graduation from the University, was made to a mass market men’s magazine. He continued to sell such short stories throughout the early years of his marriage. Many of these stories were later gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen was finally appointed teacher of English at Hampden Academy, the publichigh school in Hampden, Maine. He used to write in the evenings and weekends, writing short stories and continued working on novels.
The idea for his now extremely successful series The Dark Tower had come to him before marriage. Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came, was a poem by Robert Browning. The concept and storyline of the series became quite clear to him in his mind and his enthusiastic nature spurred him to start work on The Dark Tower, but his meagre income made it impossible to pursue the novel further and reluctantly he had to file it away. Soon after getting his teaching job that earned him $ 6,400 a year, he kept working on his projects that he had not been able to complete earlier which included The Dark Tower.
In 1922, Naomi Rachel, their first daughter was born. The Kings then moved to Hermon, a town west of Bangor, Maine, where he started scripting a short story about a teenage girl named Carietta White. But after completing a few pages, he crumpled the pages and tossed them into the trash deciding against its story-value.
Stephen was fortunate that his wife, Tabitha, took those pages out of the trash and read them. She encouraged her husband to continue the story, which he did. This was the book that would bring a welcome change in the life of the Kings.
In January 1973, Stephen submitted Carrie to Doubleday, a publishing house, who bought the book inMarch. On May 12, Doubledaysold the paperback rights of Carrie to New American Library for $ 400,000 but Stephen King got only half of that, based on the book contract. Stephen decided to quit his teaching job and begin writing full time, on the advice from his new editor at Doubleday.
This was the dawn of Stephen King’s era. Carrie was an instant success when it was released in 1974. It was bought for films and the movie was released in 1976. The movie, during its making seemed not very promising as it featured a cast of unknowns and was directed by a little known director, and was made for a modest sum – $ 1.8 million.
Carrie astonished everyone by earning $ 30 million and garnering Oscar nominations for two of its stars. It turned Sissy Spacek into a star, and launched the careers of John Travolta, Nancy Allen, Amy Irving, William Katt and all of whom made their debuts in the film. It also established Brian De Palma as a force to be reckoned with. The movie and the book placed Stephen King in the top ranks of horror story writers.
Stephen’s next published novel, Salem’s Lot, started earlier in 1973, in a summer home on Sebago Lake in North Windham, rented for the winter. Originally titled Second Coming and then Jerusalem’s Lot, his novel Salem’s Lot was written in a small room in the garage. During this period, Stephen’s mother died of cancer, at the age of 59. They had just shifted to southern Maine because of her failing health.
In the fall of 1974, the Kings left Maine for Boulder, Colorado. There he found the setting for his next book The Shining, which he wrote in Boulder. In less than a year, the Kings returned to Maine. It was the summer of 1975.
They purchased a home in the Lakes Region of western Maine. In that house, Stephen finished writing The Stand which, like The Shining, is also set in Boulder. The Dead Zone was also written in Bridgton, Maine.
In 1977, the Kings spent three months of a projected year-long stay in England, cut the sojourn short, and returned home in mid-December, and purchased a new home in Center Lovell, Maine. After having stayed there for one summer, the Kings moved north to Orrington, near Bangor, for Stephen to teach creative writing at the University of Maine.
The Kings returned to Center Lovell in the spring of 1979. They purchased a Victorian-style house with 28 rooms, in Bangor, retaining the Center Lovell house as a summer residence.
Richard Bachman, a pseudonym that he used for a few of his books, was yet another interesting side of this writer. Stephen used this pseudonym from 1977 to 1984. He wrote Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man and Thinner under this name. In his introduction to the ‘Bachman Books’, Stephen explained, with a touch of his trademark wit and humor, why he had created Richard Bachman. He stated that Bachman was a part of himself, an alter ego which he made to give a touch to his stories that he would never think of doing in his own books.
"Bachman was the vampirish side of my existence, killed by
the sunlight of disclosure," is one of the ways be puts it, and with good reason. When reading a Bachman book, one can surely feel Stephen’s unique touch,but there is something else: a dark wit, an elevated level of grimness, and quite a different way of projecting surroundings and characters. These are just some of the attributes of a ‘Bachman’ book that does not escape the attention of the avid Stephen King reader. Briefly put, this pseudonym disguised the extent of his prolific output until the ruse became public knowledge. Discovered by a careful fan, Stephen was very upset but eventually accepted the fact that the cover was blown, saying, (again in his trademark humor) that Richard Bachman died of ‘cancer of the pseudonym.’
Stephen King had meant Richard Bachman to be a pseudonym with which he could write with a slightly different flavor than which was found in his own books.
He took the making of the pseudonym quite seriously, beginning to imagine Richard Bachman’s life as a dairy farmer; his wife, the beautiful Claudia Inez Bachman; his solitary New Hampshire mornings, spent milking the cows; getting out into the woods and thinking about his stories; and his evenings spent writing these stories, always with a glass of whiskey beside his Olivetti typewriter.
When the cover was blown, Stephen says he was ‘surprised, upset, and pissed off’, but he made light of the interviews he felt he was required to give on the subject and even when the media insisted he tell more about Bachman he would again repeat that ‘death due to cancer of the pseudonym’ was why Richard Bachman died.
Soon after, he wrote The Dark Half, which is about a writer whose pseudonym, George Stark comes to life. The Dark Half was a book that his wife, Tabitha, always hated because, for Thad Beaumont (the protagonist of the book), the dream of being a writer overwhelms the reality of being a man. Eventually (and reluctantly), Stephen decided to put Bachman aside.
One of Richard Bachman’s books, Rage, has been extremely troublesome for Stephen King. It has been a factor in a number of nasty (and sometimes mortal) incidents in the real world, cases where troubled and disturbed teenage boys have held classmates and teachers hostage and in some cases have committed murder. The FBI has queried him about the book, but criminal psychologists have sided with him saying, "this novel never walked into a classroom and shot anybody."
Yet another distinguishing feature of King’s career are the cameos he has played in movies made out of his stories – a feature which is matched in consistency, only by another legend of the macabre, Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock was a director who loved to make brief appearances in his movies, often in so subtle a manner, that he was extremely difficult to spot. The audience had made a game of waiting to see where Hitchcock was hiding in a movie. This filled the moviemakers with concern. Afraid that such an act would ruin the total entertainment of the viewers, Hitchcock began coming on screen within the first five minutes, so that the remainder of the movie could be watched without distraction. This idea appealed to Stephen King very much and he started to make cameos in many of his own movies. He was not unknown to acting, having been exposed to acting earlier when he was in college. He put his College Dramatic Society experience to use when he appeared in movies like Creepshow, Knight Riders, Sleepwalkers, The Stand, The Langoliers, Thinner, and the mini-series: The Shining.
On June 19, 1999, Stephen King was strolling outside his home in Lovell, Maine, when he was struck by a minivan injuring him quite seriously. The driver of the minivan was a disabled man named Bryan Smith, who had lost control of his vehicle after being distracted by his Rottveiler, which was loose in the minivan. Bryan Smith was indicted for aggravated assault but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of driving to endanger, which allowed him to avoid serving any jail time.
An eerie twist to this traumatic episode is that Bryan Smith was found dead, lying in his bed, at his locked home in September 2000. An autopsy failed to reveal the cause of his death. Stephen King underwent extensive surgery on his leg and hip, after which he had to spend months on major rehabilitation and physical therapy before he was able to walk.
In the summer of 2000, King opened new doors in publishing when he released a first installment of his story The Plant on his official website. His venture was extremely successful with many readers paying more than the required dollar to read King’s work.
He plans to continue such online ventures in the future. His book Dreamcatcher, was published in early 2001. The latest project of Stephen King is a prime-time television series for the channel ABC. It is about a hospital with a spooky past. Another series, The Kingdom is to be aired during the 2002-2003 season, it is based on director Lars von Trier's tremendously succesful Danish TV miniseries that has gained a huge cult following.
Stephen King has no plans for early retirement, which means we can still expect this Chronicler of the Unknown continue to entertain and scare us with his tales from the dark side.
Over the years, the name Stephen King has become synonymous with cryptic tales, stories of horror, studies of the macabre, and also a continuity of sagas filled with horror, suspense, and intrigue. His stories catapult the reader into a world of dark fantasy, unknown terror, with descriptions of characters so meticulous and vivid that they seem astonishingly real.
King’s narrations of horror cover a variety of themes – from occult monsters like vampires, werewolves, ghouls etc, to transformations of everyday objects like cars into demonic entities. His stories at times deal with the complex minds of psychopaths exploring the dark side of human nature. All in all, his books tend to grip the reader in a maelstrom of intense excitement, spellbinding suspense, and horrific intrigue.
September 21, 1947
Stephen Edwin King was born in Maine, Portland, USA.
1954
Stephen wrote his first tale.
October 4, 1957
Stephen had his first touch of terror, while in a movie theater showing Earth vs. The Flying Saucers.
1958
The family permanently shifted to Maine, Androscoggin county, in Stephen’s maternal grandfather's house.
1959
Stephen discovered his forte after discovering, in his aunt’s attic, books that belonged to his father who was an avid reader of Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and Matheson.
1962
He began attending Lisbon High School in Lisbon Falls near Durham. He started sending his tales to specialized magazines without success.
1963
At his own expense, with friend Chris Chesley, he published a collection of short tales with the help of a cyclostyle.
1965
I Was A Teenage Grave Robber was published in Comic Review, earning him $ 35.
1966
He graduated and started attending the Maine University in Orono.
1969
The Maine Campus, Stephen’s University’s paper, had a corner called King’s Garbage Truck, that published not only tales, but even general articles.
1970
Stephen received his degree in English literature. His meeting with Tabitha Jane Spruce and also the initiation of the Dark Tower project, took place this year.
1971
He took the vows with Tabitha on January 2. After a series of humble jobs, he got the post of a teacher of English at Hampden Academy.
1972
The King household received its newest member in the form of Naomi Rachel, their first daughter. The family shifted to Hermon, near Bangor.
1973
Doubleday gave Stephen a payment of US $ 2,500, requesting for the first time, a novel, Carrie.
1974
Stephen moved his family to Boulder, Colorado. He started writing The Shining, a book with autobiographical hints. The rights for the paperback edition of Salem’s Lot were sold for $ 500,000.
1975
Salem’s Lot is published, and its movie rights were sold by Stephen.
1976
The movie Carrie was made at the cost of $ 1.7 million and grossed $ 30 million at the box office.
1977
The Shining (Stephen King’s first bestseller) and Rage (written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, which Stephen uses for the first time) were published.
1978
In November, Stephen King began writing the essay Danse Macabre. Upon the death of his daughter Naomi’s pet cat, the idea of writing Pet Sematary, came to Stephen’s mind.
1979
The Dead Zone and The Long Walk were published. Stephen King received two nominations for the World Fantasy Awards for Night Shift and The Stand.
1980
Stephen started working on the novel, It. and the movie based on his book The Shining, is presented.
1981
Roadwork and Cujo were published. Roadwork is the third published under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman.
1982
Stephen King was elected Best Novelist of the Year by ‘Us’ magazine, in a survey.
1983
Pet Sematary and Christine were published.
1984
His joint venture with Peter Straub, The Talisman, was published, followed shortly by Thinner under the Bachman pseudonym.
1985
The Richard Bachman cover was discovered by a careful fan.
1986
His book, It, was published.
1987
The Eyes Of The Dragon, a book written for his daughter Naomi, was published.
1988
Stephen King broke up with his agent Kirby McCauley and replaced him with Arthur B. Greene.
1989
His tales Dedication and The Night Flyer, won him two nominations for the Bram Stoker Awards. Both of these novels were later printed in the collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes.
1990
Stephen King forced his editor to publish the complete and uncut version of The Stand, having modified the beginning and the final lines.
1991
At last, the new part of The Dark Tower saga, was published after four years.
1993
Nightmares and Dreamscapes was published; a collection of short stories written over a lengthy period of time.
1994
Insomnia was published and King promoted it by visiting the independent libraries of the country on his Harley Davidson motorcycle.
1995
He won a Bram Stoker Award for the best short story with Lunch at Gotham Café.
1996
‘USA Today’ defined 1996 as being ‘Stephen King’s Golden Year’.
1997
The constant readers’ expectations were fulfilled finally after six years : The Dark Tower saga appeared again with Wizard and Glass.
1998
Bag of Bones turns out to be one of the year’s bestsellers. The movie Apt Pupil was released in the cinemas.
1999
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon was published. The Bram Stoker Award and Locus Award goes to Bag Of Bones.
2000
Riding The Bullet, an e-book, is distributed only on the Internet. In July, Philtrum Press releases the first part of the novel, The Plant, only on the Internet. It is downloadable from the official web site www.stephenking.com On Writing, is published in October.
2001
His book, Dreamcatcher, was published.
The general demeanor of Stephen King is that of a witty, compassionate, and intelligent man. He is also known as a man with an ascorbic sense of humor. His quotes, at the rare moments that he does quote, contain a funny and unique touch of humor. At the same time, they can be quite thought provoking, given below are two such examples:
• The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything that happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance… logic can be happily tossed out of the window.
• Those in the grip of a strong drug --- heroin, devil grass, true love --- often find themselves trying to maintain a precarious balance between secrecy and ecstasy as they walk the tight ropes of their lives.
• I write fantasies, but draw from the world I see. If that sometimes hurts, it's because the truth usually does.
To simply and monotonously put down all the achievements of Stephen King would be an injustice to the reader as well as the writer. Nevertheless, his prime achievement is also the most obvious one; he is currently one of the most skilled storytellers of horror, who has carved out a niche for himself which indisputably speaks for itself.
Some of the occasions when society has acknowledged his skills and paid tribute to his extraordinary literary talent are given below.
1979
Two nominations for his books, The Stand and Night Shift at the World Fantasy Awards.
1981
Career Alumni Award from Maine University.
1982
Hugo Award for Danse Macabre World Fantasy Award for his story Do the dead sing ? Elected Best Novelist of the Year by the magazine ‘Us’.
1988
Bram Stoker Award for his novel Misery. Two nominations for the Bram Stoker Awards for his stories Dedication and The Night Flyer.
1990
O. Henry Award and World Fantasy Award for his short story The Man in the Black Suit.
