 Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his parents separated when Stephen was a toddler, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of the elderly couple. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged. Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and then Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums. He and Tabitha Spruce married in January of 1971. He met Tabitha in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono, where they both worked as students. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines. Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many of these were later gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies. In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels. In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co. accepted the novel Carrie for publication.  On Mother's Day of that year, Stephen learned from his new editor at Doubleday, Bill Thompson, that a major paperback sale would provide him with the means to leave teaching and write full-time. At the end of the summer of 1973, the Kings moved their growing family to southern Maine because of Stephen's mother's failing health. Renting a summer home on Sebago Lake in North Windham for the winter, Stephen wrote his next-published novel, originally titled Second Coming and then Jerusalem's Lot, before it became 'Salem's Lot, in a small room in the garage. During this period, Stephen's mother died of cancer, at the age of 59. 
Carrie was published in the spring of 1974. That same fall, the Kings left Maine for Boulder, Colorado. They lived there for a little less than a year, during which Stephen wrote The Shining, set in Colorado.  Returning to Maine in the summer of 1975, the Kings purchased a home in the Lakes Region of western Maine. At that house, Stephen finished writing The Stand, much of which also is set in Boulder. The Dead Zone was also written in Bridgton.   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, purchasing a new home in Center Lovell, Maine. After living there one summer, the Kings moved north to Orrington, near Bangor, so that Stephen could teach creative writing at the University of Maine at Orono. The Kings returned to Center Lovell in the spring of 1979. In 1980, the Kings purchased a second home in Bangor, retaining the Center Lovell house as a summer home. Stephen and Tabitha now spend winters in Florida and the remainder of the year at their Bangor and Center Lovell homes. The Kings have three children: Naomi Rachel, Joe Hill and Owen Phillip, and three grandchildren. Stephen is of Scots-Irish ancestry, stands 6'4" and weighs about 200 pounds. He is blue-eyed, fair-skinned, and has thick, black hair, with a frost of white most noticeable in his beard, which he sometimes wears between the end of the World Series and the opening of baseball spring training in Florida. Occasionally he wears a moustache in other seasons. He has worn glasses since he was a child. He has put some of his college dramatic society experience to use doing cameos in several of the film adaptations of his works as well as a bit part in a George Romero picture, Knightriders. Joe Hill King also appeared in Creepshow, which was released in 1982. Stephen made his directorial debut, as well as writing the screenplay, for the movie Maximum Overdrive (an adaptation of his short story "Trucks") in 1985.   Stephen and Tabitha provide scholarships for local high school students and contribute to many other local and national charities. Stephen is the 2003 recipient of The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.         
Continuing the legacy of American writers Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, and H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King is perhaps the most famous horror writer of his generation. He is known for his ability to transform the ordinary and everyday into the horrific, a talent that is exhibited in books such as Christine, about a car; Cujo, about a dog; Carrie, about a misunderstood teen; and 'Salem's Lot, about the ghostly, vacant house on the hill that exists in every town and is the stuff of neighborhood legend and childish nightmare. As Atlantic Monthly contributor Lloyd Rose wrote, "King takes ordinary emotional situations—marital stress, infidelity, peer-group-acceptance worries—and translates them into violent tales of vampires and ghosts. He writes supernatural soap operas." While some critics have dismissed King's work as genre fiction, others recognize the skill and sensitivity with which King taps our collective unconscious; his work was duly honored in 2003 when he received the National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
During King's teen years growing up in Maine, writing was a powerful diversion, and science-fiction and adventure stories comprised his first literary efforts. Penning his first story at age seven, he began submitting short fiction to magazines at age twelve, and published his first story by the time he was eighteen. In high school he authored a small, satiric newspaper titled "The Village Vomit"; in college he penned a popular and eclectic series of columns under the heading "King's Garbage Truck." He also started writing the novels he eventually published under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman—novels that focus more on elements of human alienation and brutality than supernatural horror. After graduation, King supplemented his teaching salary with various odd jobs and by selling stories to men's magazines. Searching for a form of his own, and responding to a friend's challenge to break his writing out of the machismo mold and move to longer fiction, King wrote the manuscript that was eventually published as Carrie. When the novel was marketed by its publisher in the horror genre, and went on to become a best seller as well as a feature film, King's course as a novelist was firmly set.
Like the Maine settings that are characteristic of the author's work, Death figures strongly in King's novels and short fiction. Interestingly, although his novels are geared toward older readers, King's central characters are often children or adolescents, and the empowerment of estranged young people is a theme that recurs throughout his fiction. "If Stephen King's kids have one thing in common," declared Robert Cormier in the Washington Post Book World, "it's the fact that they all are losers. In a way, all children are losers, of course—how can they be winners with that terrifying adult world stacked against them?" Cormier makes a valid point: Carrie is about a persecuted teenaged girl, while an alienated teenaged boy is the main character in King's Christine. In The Shining and Firestarter, King's young characters are marked as different through the powers they possess and by those who want to manipulate them: evil supernatural forces in The Shining, and the U.S. Government in Firestarter. Children also figure prominently, although not always as victims, in 'Salem's Lot, It, The Tommyknockers, Pet Sematary, The Eyes of the Dragon, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and The Talisman.
Many of King's novels are considered classics within the horror genre, and have become part of modern America's cultural fabric through both King's books and the popular film adaptations that have been made from them. As critics note, despite King's extreme popularity, his more recent works reflect the same high caliber of writing and stylistic experimentation as did his early work. In Desperation, for example, a group of strangers drive into Desperation, Nevada, where they encounter a malign spirit, or Tak, in the body of police officer Collie Entragian. The survivors of this apocalyptic novel are few, but include David Carver, an eleven-year-old boy who talks to God, and John Edward Marinville, an alcoholic novelist. Robert Polito, writing for the New York Times, noted that "King's peculiar knack as a novelist is to strip away much of the complexity and nearly all of the art from a terrifying vision of an unknowable universe ruled by a limited, perhaps evil God and insinuate that Gnosticism into the rituals and commodities of everyday America." Mark Harris remarked in Entertainment Weekly that King "hasn't been this intent on scaring readers—or been this successful at it—since The Stand," a terrifying read about a viral outbreak that kills most of the population of Earth.
Set in the Deep South in 1932, The Green Mile: a prison expression for death row—begins with the death of twin girls and the conviction of John Coffey for their murder. Block superintendent Paul Edgecombe, who narrates the story years later from his nursing home in Georgia, slowly unfolds the story of the mysterious Coffey, a man with no past and with a gift for healing. An Entertainment Weekly reviewer called the book a novel "that's as hauntingly touching as it is just plain haunted." The Green Mile captured the imagination of both readers and critics, and was adapted as a popular feature film.
Bag of Bone tells of a writer struggling with both his grief for the death of his wife and writer's block while living in a haunted cabin. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, published in 1999 and a short work by King's standards, centers on a nine-year-old girl from a broken home who gets lost in the Maine woods for two weeks. She has her radio with her, and survives her ordeal by listening to Boston Red Sox baseball games on her Walkman and imagining conversations with her hero, Red Sox relief pitcher Tom Gordon.
Called by Booklist contributor Ray Olson a "massive, postapocalyptic, chivalrized western," King's "Dark Tower" series encompasses seven illustrated novels published from 1982 and 2004 that feature Roland the gunslinger and his efforts to save multiple worlds from the Crimson King and the powers of Chaos. Roland, whose course of right action is mapped by The Beam, is accompanied by a small band of ragtag friends, all of whom encounter a host of adventures and challenges in both late twentieth-century Earth and King's alternate universe, all while moving along their intended path: to save the world from Evil by reaching the Dark Tower, the place where time and space meet. In a surprise for fans, King introduces himself as a character in the sixth installment, a move a Publishers Weekly reviewer called "gutsy." While commenting that "there's no denying the ingenuity with which King paints a candid picture of himself." Reviewing the final volume of the series, The Dark Tower, Library Journal reviewer Mary McNichol wrote that the series "resonates with the ancient fundamentals of story-telling."
King undertook his own epic journey of sorts beginning in 1999, along the road to physical recovery. Struck by a van while walking alongside a road near his home in Maine, the author sustained injuries to his spine, hip, ribs, and right leg. One of his broken ribs punctured a lung, and King nearly died. Fortunately, he overcame these injuries and began a slow progress toward recovery, cheered by countless cards and letters from his fans. Bedriden for a lengthy period, he began experimenting with e-publishing, and has gone on to self-publish several works on his Web site. Three years after the accident, in 2002, he announced his retirement from publishing in the mainstream press.
Just prior to announcing his retirement, King produced On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, which serves as both a writer's manual and autobiography. In addition to King's advice on crafting fiction, the author chronicles his childhood, his rise to fame, his struggles with addiction, and the horrific accident that almost ended his life. "King's writing about his own alcoholism and cocaine abuse," noted John Mark Eberhart in the Kansas City Star, "is among the best and most hon-est prose of his career." Similarly, Jack Harville reported in the Charlotte Observer that "the closing piece describes King's accident and rehabilitation. The description is harrowing, and the rehab involves both physical and emotional recovery. It is beautifully told in a narrative style that would have gained [noted grammar gurus] Strunk and White's approval."
Prior to his retirement King wrote daily, exempting only Christmas, the Fourth of July, and his birthday. He enjoys working on two things simultaneously, beginning his day early with a two-or three-mile walk: "What I'm working on in the morning is what I'm working on," he said in a panel discussion at the 1980 World Fantasy Convention, reprinted in Bare Bones. He devoted his afternoon hours to rewriting. Despite chronic headaches, occasional insomnia, and even a fear of writer's block, he continued produced six pages daily; "And that's like engraved in stone," he told Joyce Lynch Dewes Moore in Mystery. Despite retiring, the author did not see much reduction in his writing time.
Despite the fact that his books have been marketed to adult readers, King's focus on story and psychological rather than graphic violence has made his books suitable for teen readers. As he wrote in his Danse Macabre, children are "better able to deal with fantasy and terror than their elders are." In an interview for High Times, he marveled at the resilience of a child's mind and the inexplicable, yet seemingly harmless, attraction of children to nightmare-inducing stories: "We start kids off on things like 'Hansel and Gretel,' which features child abandonment, kidnaping, attempted murder, forcible detention, cannibalism, and finally murder by cremation. And the kids love it." Adults are capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality, but in the process of growing up, laments King in Danse Macabre, they develop "a good case of mental tunnel vision and a gradual ossification of the imaginative faculty"; thus, King explains, he sees the central the task of the fantasy or horror writer as enabling an adult reader to become, "for a little while, a child again."
Career -
Writer.
Has worked as a janitor, a laborer in an industrial laundry, and in a knitting mill.
Hampden Academy (high school), Hampden, ME, English teacher, 1971–73;
University of Maine, Orono, writer-in-residence, 1978–79. Owner, Philtrum Press (publishing house), and WZON-AM (rock 'n' roll radio station), Bangor, ME. Has made cameo appearances in films, including Knightriders, 1981, Creepshow, 1982, Maximum Overdrive, 1986, Pet Sematary, 1989, and The Stand, 1994. Judge for 1977
World Fantasy Awards, 1978.
Member -
Authors Guild, Authors League of America, Screen Artists Guild, Screen Writers of America, Writers Guild.
Awards, Honors -
Carrie named to School Library Journal Book List, 1975; World Fantasy Award nominations, 1976, for 'Salem's Lot, 1979, for The Stand and Night Shift, 1980, for The Dead Zone, 1981, for "The Mist," and 1983, for "The Breathing Method: A Winter's Tale," in Different Seasons; Hugo Award nomination, World Science Fiction Society, and Nebula Award nomination, Science Fiction Writers of America, both 1978, both for The Shining; Balrog Awards, second place in best novel category, for The Stand, and second place in best collection category for Night Shift, both 1979; named to American Library Association list of best books for young adults, 1979, for The Long Walk, and 1981, for Firestarter; World Fantasy Award, 1980, for contribu-tions to the field, and 1982, for story "Do the Dead Sing?"; Career Alumni Award, University of Maine at Orono, 1981; Nebula Award nomination, 1981, for story "The Way Station"; special British Fantasy Award for outstanding contribution to the genre, British Fantasy Society, 1982, for Cujo; Hugo Award, 1982, for Stephen King's Danse Macabre; named Best Fiction Writer of the Year, Us magazine, 1982; Locus Award for best collection, 1986, for Stephen King's Skeleton Crew; Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, Horror Writers Association, 1988, for Misery; Bram Stoker Award for Best Collection, 1991, for Four Past Midnight; World Fantasy award for short story, 1995, and O. Henry Award, 1996, all for The Man in the Black Suit; Bram Stoker Award for Best Novelette, 1996, for Lunch at the Gotham Cafe; Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, 1997, for The Green Mile; Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, 1999, for Bag of Bones; Bram Stoker Award nominee in novel category (with Peter Straub), 2001, for Black House; Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, National Book Award, 2003; The Stand was voted one of the nation's 100 best-loved novels by the British public as part of the BBC's The Big Read, 2003.
Adaptations -
Carrie was adapted for film by Lawrence D. Cohen, directed by Brian De Palma, United Artist, 1976, and was also produced as a Broadway musical in 1988 by Cohen and Michael Gore, developed in England by the Royal Shakespeare Company, featuring Betty Buckley; 'Salem's Lot was produced as a television miniseries in 1979 by Warner Brothers, teleplay by Paul Monash, featuring David Soul and James Mason, and was adapted for the cable channel TNT in 2004, with a teleplay by Peter Filardi and direction by Mikael Salomon; The Shining was filmed in 1980 by Warner Brothers/Hawks Films, screenplay by director Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson, starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, and was filmed for television in 1997 by Warner Bros., directed by Mick Garris, starring Rebecca De Mornay, Steven Weber, Courtland Mead, and Melvin Van Peebles; Cujo was filmed in 1983 by Warner Communications/Taft Entertainment, screenplay by Don Carlos Dunaway and Lauren Currier, featuring Dee Wallace and Danny Pintauro; The Dead Zone was filmed in 1983 by Paramount Pictures, screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, starring Christopher Walken, and was adapted as a cable television series starring Anthony Michael Hall by USA Network, beginning 2002; Christine was filmed in 1983 by Columbia Pictures, screenplay by Bill Phillips; Firestarter was produced in 1984 by Frank Capra, Jr., for Universal Pictures in association with Dino de Laurentiis, screenplay by Stanley Mann, featuring David Keith and Drew Barrymore; Stand by Me (based on King's novella The Body) was filmed in 1986 by Columbia Pictures, screenplay by Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans, directed by Rob Reiner; The Running Man was filmed in 1987 by Taft Entertainment/Barish Productions, screenplay by Steven E. de Souza, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; Misery was produced in 1990 by Columbia, directed by Reiner, screenplay by William Goldman, starring James Caan and Kathy Bates; Graveyard Shift was filmed in 1990 by Paramount, directed by Ralph S. Singleton, adapted by John Esposito; Stephen King's It was filmed as a television mini-series by ABC-TV in 1990; The Dark Half was filmed in 1993 by Orion, written and directed by George A. Romero, featuring Timothy Hutton and Amy Madigan; Needful Things was filmed in 1993 by Columbia/Castle Rock, adapted by W. D. Richter and Lawrence Cohen, directed by Fraser C. Heston, starring Max Von Sydow, Ed Harris, Bonnie Bedelia, and Amanda Plummer; The Tommyknockers was filmed as a television mini-series by ABC-TV in 1993; The Shawshank Redemption, based on King's novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption: Hope Springs Eternal, was filmed in 1994 by Columbia, written and directed by Frank Darabont, featuring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman; Dolores Claiborne was filmed in 1995 by Columbia; Thinner was filmed by Paramount in 1996, directed by Dom Holland, starring Robert John Burke, Joe Mantegna, Lucinda Jenney, and Michael Constantine; Night Flier was filmed by New Amsterdam Entertainment/Stardust International/Medusa Film in 1997, directed by Mark Pavia, starring Miguel Ferrer, Julie Entwisle, Dan Monahan, and Michael H. Moss; Apt Pupil was filmed in 1998 by TriStar Pictures, directed by Bryan Singer, starring David Schwimmer, Ian McKellen, and Brad Renfro; The Green Mile was filmed in 1999 by Castle Rock, adapted and directed by Frank Darabont, starring Tom Hanks; Hearts in Atlantis was filmed in 2001 by Castle Rock, directed by Scott Hicks, screenplay written by William Goldman, starring Anthony Hopkins; Dreamcatcher was filmed in 2003 by Warner Bros./Castle Rock Entertainment, directed by Lawrence Kasdan, written by William Goldman, starring Morgan Freeman. Several of King's short stories have also been adapted for the screen, including The Boogeyman, filmed by Tantalus in 1982 and 1984 in association with the New York University School of Undergraduate Film, screenplay by producer-director Jeffrey C. Schiro; The Woman in the Room, filmed in 1983 by Darkwoods, screenplay by director Frank Darabont, broadcast on public television in Los Angeles, 1985 (released with The Boogeyman on videocassette as Two Mini-Features from Stephen King's Nightshift Collection by Granite Entertainment Group, 1985); Children of the Corn, produced in 1984 by Donald P. Borchers and Terrence Kirby for New World Pictures, screenplay by George Goldsmith; The Word Processor (based on King's "The Word Processor of the Gods"), produced by Romero and Richard Rubenstein for Laurel Productions, 1984, teleplay by Michael Dowell, broadcast in 1985 on Tales from the Darkside series (released on videocassette by Laurel Entertainment, Inc., 1985); Gramma, filmed by CBS-TV in 1985, teleplay by Harlan Ellison, broadcast in 1986 on The Twilight Zone series; Creepshow 2 (based on "The Raft" and unpublished stories "Old Chief Wood'nhead" and "The Hitchhiker"), filmed in 1987 by New World Pictures, screenplay by Romero; Sometimes They Come Back, filmed by CBS-TV in 1987; "The Cat from Hell" included in three-segment anthology film Tales from the Darkside—The Movie, produced by Laurel Productions, 1990; The Lawnmower Man, written by director Brett Leonard and Gimel Everett for New Line Cinema, 1992; The Mangler, filmed by New Line Cinema, 1995; and The Langoliers, filmed as a television mini-series by ABC-TV, 1995; "Secret Window, Secret Garden" filmed by Columbia as Secret Window, written and directed by David Koepp, 2004; "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away" adapted as a short film by James Renner. Film rights to "1408," from Everything's Eventual, was optioned by Dimension Films.
 | Stephen KING
| Stephen King Information:
| | Eye color: | | Height: 6' 4'' (1.93 m) | | Nickname(s): The King, The King of Horror | | Notable feature(s): | | Education: University of Maine, | | Family: | | Resides in: Bangor, Maine | | Religious affiliations: | | Political affiliation: | | Personal interests/hobbies: | | Charities/Causes: | | Other: | | |
