King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. His father, Donald Ed King, a travelling vacuum salesman after returning from World War II,[10] was born in Indiana with the sur Pollock, changing it to King as an adult.[11][12][13] King's mother was Nellie Ruth King (née Pillsbury).[13] His parents were married in Scarborough, Maine on July 23, 1939.[14] Shortly afterwards, they lived with Donald's family in Chicago before moving to Croton-on-Hudson, York.[15] King's parents returned to Maine towards the end of World War II, living in a modest house in Scarborough. When King was two, his father left the family. His mother raised him and his older brother David by herself, sometimes under strain. They moved from Scarborough and depended on relatives in Chicago; Croton-on-Hudson; West De Pere, Wisconsin; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Malden, Massachusetts; and Stratford, Connecticut.[15][17] When King was 11, his family moved 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 menty chenged.[1] King was raised Methodist,[18][19] but lost his belief in organized religion while in high school. While no longer religious, he says he chooses to believe in the existence of God.[20] 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 to play with the boy, King returned speechless and seemingly in shock. later did the family learn of the death. Some commentators have suggested that this event may have psychologicy inspired some of King's darker works,[21] but King makes no mention of it in his memoir On Writing (2000). He 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". He compared 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, that had belonged to his father. King told Barnes & Noble Studios in a 2009 interview, "I k that I'd found when I read that book."[22] King attended Durham Elementary School and graduated from Lisbon High School (Maine) in Lisbon Fs, Maine, in 1966.[23] He displayed an early interest in horror as an avid reader of EC horror comics, including Tales from the Crypt, and he later paid tribute to the comics in his screenplay for Creepshow. He began writing for fun while in school, contributing articles to Dave's Rag, the spaper his brother published with a mimeograph machine, and later began selling stories to his friends based on movies he had seen. (He was forced to return the when it was discovered by his teachers.) The first of his stories to be independently published was "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber", which was serialized over four issues (three published and one unpublished) of a fanzine, Comics Review, in 1965. It was republished the follog year in revised, as "In a Half-World of Terror", in another fanzine, Stories of Suspense, edited by Marv Wolfman.[24] As a tееn, King also a Scholastic Art and Writing Award.[25] King entered the University of Maine in 1966, and graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English.[26] That year, his daughter Naomi Rachel was born. He wrote a column, Steve King's Garbage Truck, for the student spaper, The Maine Campus, and participated in a writing workshop organized by Burton Hatlen.[27] King held a variety of jobs to pay for his studies, including as a janitor, a gas-station attendant, and an industrial laundry worker. He met his, fellow student Tabitha Spruce, at the university's Raymond H. Fogler Library after one of Professor Hatlen's workshops; they wed in 1971.[27] Career Beginnings In 1971, King worked as a teacher at Hampden Academy. King sold his first professional short story, "The Glass Floor", to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967.[1] After graduating from the University of Maine, King earned a certificate to teach high school but, unable to find a teaching post, 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 cones (he was annoyed after one of the cones knocked his muffler loose), he was fined 250 for petty larceny but had no to pay. However, a then arrived for "The Raft" (then titled "The Float"), and King cashed it to pay the fine.[28] 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.[1] During 1966–1970, he wrote a draft about his dystopian novel ced The Long Walk[29] and the anti-war novel Sword in the Darkness,[30][31] but neither of the works was published at the time; The Long Walk was later released in 1979. Carrie and aftermath In 1973, King's novel, Carrie, was accepted by publishing house, Doubleday. It was King's fourth novel,[32] but the first to be published. He wrote it on his Tabitha's portable typewriter. It began as a short story intended for Cavalier magazine, but King tossed the first three pages in the garbage can.[33] Tabitha recovered the pages and encouraged him to finish the story, saying she would help him with the female perspective; he followed her advice and expanded it into a novel.[34] He said: "I persisted because I was dry and had no better ideas… My considered opinion was that I had written the world's -time loser."[35] 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 hystericy religious mother being a particularly damaged one), and gory in even more."[36] When Carrie was chosen for publication, King's was out of service. Doubleday editor William Thompson—who became King's close—sent a telegram to King's house in late March or early April 1973[37] which read: "Carrie Officiy A Doubleday Book. 2,500 Advance Against Royalties. Congrats, Kid – The Future Lies Ahead, Bill."[38] King said he bought a Ford Pinto with the advance.[37] On May 13, 1973, American Library bought the paperback rights for 400,000, which—in accordance with King's contract with Doubleday—was split between them.[39][40] 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.[41] King's 'Salem's Lot was published in 1975. In a 1987 issue of The Highway Patrolman magazine, he said, "The story seems sort of down home to me. I have a special cold spot in my heart for it!"[42] After his mother's death, King and his family moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he wrote The Shining (published 1977). The family returned to Auburn, Maine in 1975, where he completed The Stand (published 1978). In 1977, the family, with the addition of Owen Philip, his third and youngest child, traveled briefly to England. They returned to Maine that f, where King began teaching creative writing at the University of Maine.[43] In 1982, King published Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas with a more dramatic bent than the horror fiction for which he is famous.[44] It is notable for having three of its four novellas turned into Hollywood films: Stand by Me (1986) was adapted from The Body;[45] The Shawshank Redemption (1994) was adapted from Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption;[46] and Apt Pupil (1998) was adapted from the novella of the same .[47][48] In 1985, King wrote his first work for the comic book,[49] writing a few pages of the benefit X-Men comic book Heroes for Hope Starring the X-Men. The book, whose were donated to 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 comics, such as Harlan Ellison.[50] The follog year, King published It (1986), which was t-selling hardcover novel in the United States that year,[51] and wrote the introduction to Batman No. 400, an anniversary issue where he expressed his preference for the character over Superman.[52][53] The Dark Tower books Main article: The Dark Tower (series) 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 initiy published in five instments 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 ced The Dark Tower, whose books King wrote and published infrequently over four decades (1978-2012).[54] 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 again and to ay his fears that his popularity was an accident. An alternate explanation was that publishing standards at the time owed a single book a year.[55] He picked up the from the Canadian hard rock band Bachman–Turner Overdrive, of which he is a fan.[56] Richard Bachman was exposed as King's pseudonym by a persistent Washington, D.C. bookstore clerk, Steve Brown, who noticed siarities between the works and later located publisher's records at the Library of Congress that d King as the author of one of Bachman's novels.[57] This led to a press release heralding Bachman's "death"—supposedly from "cancer of the pseudonym".[58] 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.[59] King has used other pseudonyms. The short story "The Fifth Quarter" was published under the pseudonym John Swithen (the of a character in the novel Carrie), by Cavalier in April 1972.[60] The story was reprinted in King's collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes in 1993 under his own . In the introduction to the Bachman novel Blaze, King, 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 2015 under the pseudonym Beryl Evans, who was portrayed by actress ison Davies during a book signing at San Diego Comic-Con,[61] 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.[62] Digital era Stephen King at the Harvard Book Store, June 6, 2005 In 2000, King published online a serialized horror novel, The Plant.[63] At first the public assumed that King had abandoned the project because were unsuccessful, but King later stated that he had simply run out of stories.[64] The unfinished epistolary novel is still available from King's official site, . Also in 2000, he wrote a digital novella, Riding the Bullet, and saying he foresaw e-books becoming 50 of the market "probably by 2013 and maybe by 2012". However, he also stated: "the thing—people tire of the toys quickly."[65] King wrote the first draft of the 2001 novel Dreamcatcher...
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