Stephen Edwin King
(born September 21, 1947) is an American
author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, and fantasy novels. His books
have sold more than 350 million copies, many of which have been adapted into
feature films, miniseries, television series, and comic books. King has
published 61 novels (including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman) and six non-fiction books. He has written approximately 200 short
stories, most of which have been published in book collections.
King has received Bram
Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards,
and the British Fantasy Society Awards.
In 2003, the National Book Foundation
awarded him the Medal for Distinguished
Contribution to American Letters. He has also received awards for his
contribution to literature for his entire oeuvre, such as the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (2004) and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America (2007). In 2015, King was awarded a National Medal of Arts from the United
States National Endowment for the Arts for his contributions to literature.
He has been described as the "King of Horror".
Early life
Stephen King was
born September 21, 1947, in Portland,
Maine. His father, Donald Edwin King,
was a merchant seaman. Donald was born under the surname Pollock, but as an adult, he used the surname King. Stephen's mother was Nellie Ruth (née Pillsbury). The two were married on July 23, 1939, in Scarborough, Maine. Shortly afterward, they lived with Donald's
family in Chicago and then moved to
Croton-on-Hudson, New York.
The Kings returned to Maine towards the end of World War II, living in a modest house
in Scarborough. When King was two
years old, his father left the family. King's mother raised Stephen and his
older brother, David, by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. The
family moved from Scarborough,
depending on relatives in Chicago; Croton-on-Hudson; West De Pere, Wisconsin; Fort
Wayne, Indiana; Malden,
Massachusetts; and Stratford,
Connecticut. When King was 11, his
family returned to Durham, Maine,
where his mother cared for her parents until their deaths. She then became a
caregiver in a local residential facility for the mentally challenged. King was raised Methodist but lost his
belief in organized religion while in high school. While no longer religious,
King chooses to believe in the existence of God.
As a child, King apparently witnessed one of his friends
being struck and killed by a train, though he has no memory of the event. His
family told him that after leaving home to play with the boy, King returned,
speechless and seemingly in shock. Only later did the family learn of the
friend's death. Some commentators have suggested that this event may have
psychologically inspired some of King's darker works, but King makes no mention
of it in his memoir On Writing
(2000).
King related in detail his primary inspiration for writing
horror fiction in his non-fiction Danse
Macabre (1981), in a chapter titled "An
Annoying Autobiographical Pause." King compares his uncle's dowsing
for water using the bough of an apple branch with the sudden realization of
what he wanted to do for a living. That inspiration occurred while browsing
through an attic with his elder brother, when King uncovered a paperback
version of an H. P. Lovecraft collection
of short stories he remembers as The
Lurker in the Shadows, which had belonged to his father. King told Barnes & Noble Studios during a
2009 interview, "I knew that I'd
found a home when I read that book."
King attended Durham
Elementary School and graduated from Lisbon
Falls High School, in Lisbon Falls,
Maine in 1966. He displayed an early
interest in horror as an avid reader of EC's horror comics; including Tales
from the Crypt (he later paid tribute to the comics in his screenplay for Creepshow). He began writing for fun
while still in school, contributing articles to Dave's Rag, the newspaper his brother published with a mimeograph
machine, and later began selling to his friends stories based on movies he had
seen (though when discovered by his teachers, he was forced to return the
profits). The first of his stories to be independently published was "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber";
it was serialized over four issues (three published and one unpublished) of a
fanzine, Comics Review, in 1965. That
story was published the following year in a revised form as "In a Half-World of Terror" in
another fanzine, Stories of Suspense,
edited by Marv Wolfman. As a teen, King also won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award.
From 1966, King studied at the University of Maine, graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English.
That year, his daughter Naomi Rachel was born. He wrote a
column, Steve King's Garbage Truck,
for the student newspaper, The Maine
Campus, and participated in a writing workshop organized by Burton Hatlen. King
held a variety of jobs to pay for his studies, including janitor, gas pump
attendant, and worker at an industrial laundry. King met his future wife,
fellow student Tabitha Spruce, at
the University's Fogler Library
after one of Professor Hatlen's workshops;
they wed in 1971.
Career
Beginnings
After graduating from the University of Maine, King earned a certificate to teach high school
but, unable to find a teaching post immediately, initially supplemented his
laboring wage by selling short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier. Many of these early stories
have been republished in the collection Night
Shift. The short story "The
Raft" was published in Adam,
a men's magazine. After being arrested for driving over a traffic cone, he was
fined $250 and had no money to pay the petty larceny fine. However, payment
arrived for the short story "The
Raft" (then entitled "The
Float"), and King was able 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.
Carrie and aftermath
In 1973, King's novel Carrie
was accepted by publishing house Doubleday.
Carrie was King's fourth novel, but
it was the first to be published. It was written on a portable typewriter that
belonged to his wife. The novel began as a short story intended for Cavalier magazine, but King tossed the
first three pages of his work in the garbage can. Tabitha
King fished the pages out of the garbage can and encouraged him to finish
the story, saying that she would help him with the female perspective; he
followed her advice and expanded it into a novel. King said, "I
persisted because I was dry and had no better ideas… my considered opinion was
that I had written the world's all-time loser." According to 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."
When Carrie was
chosen for publication, King's phone was out of service. Doubleday editor William
Thompson – who would eventually become King's close friend – sent a
telegram to King's house in late March or early April 1973 which read: "Carrie Officially A Doubleday Book.
$2,500 Advance Against Royalties. Congrats, Kid – The Future Lies Ahead,
Bill." According to King, he bought a new Ford Pinto
with the money from the advance. On May 13, 1973, New American Library bought the paperback rights for $400,000,
which—in accordance with King's contract with Doubleday—was split between them. Carrie
set King's career in motion and became a significant novel in the horror genre.
In 1976, it was made into a successful horror film.
King's Salem's Lot
was published in 1975. In a 1987 issue of The
Highway Patrolman magazine, he stated, "The
story seems sort of down home to me. I have a special cold spot in my heart for
it!" After his mother's death,
King and his family moved to Boulder,
Colorado, where King wrote The
Shining (published 1977). The family returned to western Maine in 1975, where King completed his fourth novel, The Stand (published 1978). In 1977, the
family, with the addition of Owen
Phillip (his third and last child), traveled briefly to England, returning to Maine that fall, where King began
teaching creative writing at the University
of Maine.
In 1982, King published Different
Seasons, a collection of four novellas with a more serious dramatic bent
than the horror fiction for which King is famous. The collection is notable for having had
three of its four novellas turned into Hollywood films: Stand by Me (1986) was adapted from the novella The Body,[40] The Shawshank Redemption (1994) was adapted from the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,
and Apt Pupil (1998) was adapted from
the novella of the same name.
In 1985, King wrote his first work for the comic book
medium, writing a few pages of the benefit X-Men
comic book Heroes for Hope Starring
the X-Men. The book, whose profits were donated to assist with famine
relief in Africa was written by a
number of different authors in the comic book field, such as Chris Claremont, Stan Lee, and Alan Moore,
as well as authors not primarily associated with that industry, such as Harlan Ellison. The following year, King published It (1986),
which was the best-selling hard-cover novel in the United States that year, and
wrote the introduction to Batman No. 400,
an anniversary issue in which he expressed his preference for that character
over Superman.
The Dark Tower books
In the late 1970s, King began what became a series of
interconnected stories about a lone gunslinger, Roland, who pursues the "Man
in Black" in an alternate-reality 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 of these stories, The Dark Tower:
The Gunslinger was initially published in five installments by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science
Fiction under the editorship of Edward
L. Ferman, from 1977 to 1981. The
Gunslinger was continued as an eight-book epic series called The Dark Tower, whose books King wrote
and published infrequently over four decades.
Pseudonyms
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, King published a handful
of short novels—Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man (1982) and Thinner
(1984)—under the pseudonym Richard
Bachman. The idea behind this was to test whether he could replicate his
success again and to allay his fears that his popularity was an accident. An
alternate explanation was that publishing standards at the time allowed only a
single book a year. He picked up the
name from the hard rock band Bachman-Turner
Overdrive, of which he is a fan.
Richard Bachman
was exposed as King's pseudonym by a persistent Washington, D.C. bookstore clerk, Steve Brown, who noticed similarities between the works and later
located publisher's records at the Library
of Congress that named King as the author of one of Bachman's novels. This led
to a press release heralding Bachman's
"death"—supposedly from "cancer of the pseudonym". King
dedicated his 1989 book The Dark Half,
about a pseudonym turning on a writer, to "the
deceased Richard Bachman", and in 1996, when the Stephen King novel Desperation
was released, the companion novel The
Regulators carried the "Bachman"
byline.
In 2006, during a press conference in London, King declared that he had discovered another Bachman novel, titled Blaze. It was published on June 12,
2007. In fact, the original manuscript had been held at King's alma mater, the University of Maine in Orono, 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. The short story "The Fifth Quarter" was published
under the pseudonym John Swithen (the
name of a character in the novel Carrie),
by Cavalier in April 1972. The story was reprinted in King's collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes in 1993
under his own name. In the introduction to the Bachman novel Blaze, King
claims, with tongue-in-cheek, that "Bachman"
was the person using the Swithen
pseudonym.
The "children's
book" Charlie the Choo-Choo: From the World of The Dark Tower was
published in 2016 under the pseudonym Beryl
Evans, who was portrayed by actress Allison
Davies during a book signing at San
Diego Comic-Con, and illustrated by Ned
Dameron. It is adapted from a fictional book central to the plot of King's
previous novel The Dark Tower III: The
Waste Lands.
Digital era
In 2000, King published online a serialized horror novel, The Plant. At first the public presumed that King had abandoned
the project because sales were unsuccessful, but King later stated that he had
simply run out of stories. The
unfinished epistolary novel is still available from King's official site, now
free. Also in 2000, he wrote a digital novella, Riding the Bullet, and has said he sees e-books becoming 50% of the
market "probably by 2013 and maybe
by 2012". But he also warns: "Here's
the thing—people tire of the new toys quickly."
King wrote the first draft of the 2001 novel Dreamcatcher with a notebook and a
Waterman fountain pen, which he called "the
world's finest word processor".
In August 2003, King began writing a column on pop culture
appearing in Entertainment Weekly,
usually every third week. The column was called The Pop of King (a play on the nickname "The King of Pop" commonly attributed to Michael Jackson).
In 2006, King published an apocalyptic novel, Cell. The book features a sudden force
in which every cell phone user turns into a mindless killer. King noted in the
book's introduction that he does not use cell phones.
In 2008, King published both a novel, Duma Key and a collection, Just
After Sunset. The latter featured 13 short stories, including a previously
unpublished novella, N. Starting July
28, 2008, N. was released as a
serialized animated series to lead up to the release of Just After Sunset.
In 2009, King published Ur,
a novella was written exclusively for the launch of the second-generation Amazon Kindle and available only on Amazon.com, and Throttle, a novella co-written with his son Joe Hill and released later as an audiobook titled Road Rage, which included Richard Matheson's short story "Duel". King's novel Under the Dome was published on November
10 of that year; it is a reworking of an unfinished novel he tried writing
twice in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and at 1,074 pages, it is the largest
novel he has written since It (1986).
Under the Dome debuted at No. 1 in The New York Times Bestseller List.
On February 16, 2010, King announced on his Web site that
his next book would be a collection of four previously unpublished novellas
called Full Dark, No Stars. In April
of that year, King published Blockade
Billy, an original novella issued first by independent small press Cemetery Dance Publications and later
released in mass-market paperback by Simon
& Schuster. The following month, DC
Comics premiered American Vampire,
a monthly comic book series written by King with short-story writer Scott Snyder, and illustrated by Rafael Albuquerque, which represents
King’s first original comics work. King wrote the background history of the very
first American vampire, Skinner Sweet, in the first five-issue
story arc. Scott Snyder wrote the
story of Pearl.
King's next novel, 11/22/63, was published November 8, 2011,
and was nominated for the 2012 World
Fantasy Award Best Novel. The eighth
Dark Tower volume, The Wind Through the Keyhole, was
published in 2012. King's next book was Joyland, a novel about "an amusement-park serial killer",
according to an article in The Sunday
Times, published on April 8, 2012.
During his Chancellor's
Speaker Series talk at University of
Massachusetts Lowell on December 7, 2012, King indicated that he was
writing a crime novel about a retired policeman being taunted by a murderer.
With a working title Mr. Mercedes and
inspired by a true event about a woman driving her car into a McDonald's
restaurant, it was originally meant to be a short story just a few pages long. In an interview with Parade, published May 26, 2013, King confirmed that the novel was "more or less" completed he
published it in June 2013. Later, on June 20, 2013, while doing a video chat
with fans as part of promoting the upcoming Under
the Dome TV series, King mentioned he was halfway through writing his next
novel, Revival, which was released November 11, 2014.
King announced in June 2014 that Mr. Mercedes is part of a trilogy; the second book, Finders Keepers, was released on June 2,
2015. On April 22, 2015, it was revealed that King was working on the third
book of the trilogy, End of Watch, which
was ultimately released on June 7, 2016.
During a tour to promote End
of Watch, King revealed that he had collaborated on a novel, set in a
women's prison in West Virginia,
with his son, Owen King to be titled
Sleeping Beauties.
Collaborations
Writings
King has written two novels with horror novelist Peter Straub: The Talisman (1984) and a sequel, Black House (2001). King has indicated that he and Straub will
likely write the third and concluding book in this series, the tale of Jack Sawyer, but has set no deadline for
its completion.
King 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.
The Diary of Ellen
Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red (2001) was a paperback tie-in for the
King-penned miniseries Rose Red
(2002). Published under anonymous authorship, the book was written by Ridley Pearson. The novel is written
in the form of a diary by Ellen Rimbauer,
and annotated by the fictional professor of paranormal activity, Joyce Reardon. The novel also presents a
fictional afterword by Ellen Rimbauer's
grandson, Steven. Intended to be a promotional item rather than a stand-alone work,
its popularity spawned a 2003 prequel television miniseries to Rose Red, titled The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer. This spin-off is a rare occasion of
another author being granted permission to write commercial work using
characters and story elements invented by King. The novel tie-in idea was
repeated on Stephen King's next
project, the miniseries Kingdom Hospital.
Richard Dooling, King's collaborator
on Kingdom Hospital and writer of
several episodes in the miniseries, published a fictional diary, The Journals of Eleanor Druse, in 2004. Eleanor Druse is a key character in Kingdom Hospital, much as Dr. Joyce Reardon and Ellen Rimbauer are key characters in Rose Red.
Throttle (2009), a
novella written in collaboration with his son Joe Hill appears in the anthology He Is Legend: Celebrating Richard Matheson. Their second novella collaboration, In the Tall Grass (2012), was published in
two parts in Esquire. It was later released in e-book and audiobook
formats, the latter read by Stephen Lang.
King and his son Owen
King wrote the novel Sleeping
Beauties, released in 2017, which is set in a women's prison.
Music
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. The
Blue Öyster Cult song "(Don't
Fear) The Reaper" was also used in the King TV series The Stand.
King collaborated with Michael
Jackson to create Ghosts (1996),
a 40-minute musical video.[89] King states he was motivated to collaborate as
he is "always interested in trying
something new, and for (him), writing a minimusical would be new". In 2012 King collaborated with musician Shooter Jennings and his band Hierophant, providing the narration for
their album, Black Ribbons. King played guitar for the rock band Rock Bottom Remainders, several of
whose members are authors. Other members include Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson,
Scott Turow, Amy Tan, James McBride, Mitch Albom, Roy Blount, Jr., Matt Groening, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Sam
Barry, and Greg Iles. King and
the other band members collaborated to release an e-book called Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever
(of Authors) Tells All (June 2013). King wrote a musical entitled Ghost Brothers of Darkland County (2012)
with musician John Mellencamp.
Comments
Post a Comment