Background and career
Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author. Dubbed the "King of Horror", he is widely known for his horror fiction and has also explored other genres, among them suspense, crime, science-fiction, fantasy, and mystery. In a career spanning six decades, he has written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in collections. His debut, Carrie (1974), established him in horror, and 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 (1983), Stand by Me (1986), Misery (1990), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Dolores Claiborne (1995), The Green Mile (1999), It (2017), The Life of Chuck (2024) and The Long Walk (2025). 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."
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. He 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. King 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." He recalls, "The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi. When that little deer gets caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also exhilarated." He recalls showing his mother a story he copied out of a comic book. She responded: "I bet you could do better. Write one of your own." He recalls "an immense feeling of possibility at the idea, as if I had been ushered into a vast building filled with closed doors and had been given the key to open any I liked." 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 asked a bookmobile driver, "Do you have any stories about how kids really are?" She gave him a copy of Lord of the Flies, which 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." He attended Durham Elementary School and entered Lisbon High School in Lisbon Falls, Maine, in 1962. He 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.
In 1966, King entered the University of Maine at Orono on a scholarship. While there, he wrote for the student newspaper, The Maine Campus, and found mentors in the professors Edward Holmes and Burton Hatlen. King participated in Hatlen's writing workshop, 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. King and Spruce wed in 1971. He paid tribute to Hatlen, "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."
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 was unable to find a teaching post immediately. He sold short stories to magazines like Cavalier. Many of these early stories were republished in Night Shift (1978). In 1971, King was hired as an English teacher at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. He continued to contribute short stories to magazines and worked on ideas for novels, including the anti-war novel Sword in the Darkness, still unpublished.
King recalls the origin of his debut, Carrie (1974): "Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together." It began as a short story intended for Cavalier; King tossed the first three pages in the trash but Tabitha recovered them, saying she wanted to know what happened next. She told him: "You've got something here. I really think you do." He followed her advice and expanded it into a novel. 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 (1975), which King called "Peyton Place meets Dracula". King's mother died from uterine cancer around the time 'Salem's Lot was published. Following 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 (1977), about an alcoholic 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 (1978), an apocalyptic novel about a pandemic and its aftermath. King recalls that it was the novel that took him the longest to write, and "also the one my longtime readers still seem to like the best". In 1977, the Kings, with the addition of Owen Philip, traveled briefly to England. They returned to Maine that fall, and King began teaching creative writing at the University of Maine. The Dead Zone (1979), about an English teacher gifted with second sight, was his first novel set in Castle Rock, Maine. King reflected that with The Dead Zone, "I really hit my stride."
The courses King taught on horror provided the basis for Danse Macabre (1981), which won the Locus Award for Best Non-fiction. His first fiction of the decade was Firestarter (1980), about a girl with pyrokinesis. King dealt with addiction for much of the 1980s and wrote while intoxicated, saying he "barely remembers writing" Cujo (1981). Different Seasons (1982) is a collection of four novellas with a more serious dramatic bent than the horror fiction for which he had become famous. The first three 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. Alan Cheuse wrote "Each of the first three novellas has its hypnotic moments, and the last one is a horrifying little gem." He returned to the supernatural with Christine (1983), "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 raise the dead, albeit imperfectly. He initially found it too disturbing to publish, but resurrected it to fulfill his contract with Doubleday. Cycle of the Werewolf, illustrated by Bernie Wrightson, was "originally intended to be published in the format of a calendar with twelve vignettes, one for each month of the year." King published The Eyes of the Dragon, a high fantasy novel he wrote for his daughter, through his Philtrum Press. In 1985, King published Skeleton Crew, a book of short fiction including "The Reach" and The Mist. He wanted to move on from horror with a "final exam" that would include "every monster in the world": " Dracula, Frankenstein, Jaws, The Werewolf, The Crawling Eye, Rodan..." These influences coalesced into It (1986), about a group of seven friends who are terrorized by the eponymous entity, which takes the form of its victims' fears and haunts the town of Derry, Maine. He wanted to "bring on all the monsters one last time…and call it It." It won the August Derleth Award in 1987. The Eyes of the Dragon was widely published in 1987. The book was well received by critics (The New York Times praised its "pellucid" prose) but not some of King's fans, who resented his departure from horror. He followed it with Misery, about a popular writer who is injured in a car wreck and held captive by his self-described "number-one fan". Misery shared the inaugural Bram Stoker Award with Robert R. McCammon's Swan Song. King says the novel's central conflict was a metaphor for addiction. The Tommyknockers is a science fiction novel filled, he says, with metaphors for addiction. After its publication, Tabitha staged an intervention, and he agreed to seek treatment. The Dark Half (1989) is about an author who kills off his literary alter-ego, only to find he's taken on a life of his own. In an author's note, King writes that "I am indebted to the late Richard Bachman."
