Stephen King

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For other people named Stephen King, see Stephen King (disambiguation).
Stephen King

Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author best known for horror novels. King's extremely popular books are among the best-selling ever.

King's stories frequently involve an unremarkable protagonist—middle-class families, children, and often writers—being submerged into increasingly horrifying circumstances. He also produces more typical literary work, including the novellas The Body and Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (later adapted as the movies Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption, respectively), as well as The Green Mile. King evinces a thorough knowledge of the horror genre, as shown in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, which chronicles several decades of notable works in both literature and cinema.

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Biography

Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine to Donald Edwin King and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury. When King was two years old, his father deserted his family and Ruth raised King and his adopted older brother David by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. The family moved to Ruth's home town of Durham, Maine but also spent brief periods in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Stratford, Connecticut. King attended Durham Elementary School and then nearby Lisbon High School.

King has been writing since an early age. When in school, he wrote stories based on movies he'd seen recently and sold them to his friends. This was not popular among his teachers, and he was forced to return his profits when this was discovered.

The stories were copied using a mimeo machine that his brother David used to copy David's newspaper, "Dave's Rag", which he self-published. "Dave's Rag" was about local events, and King would often contribute. At around the age of thirteen, King discovered a box of his father's old books at his aunt's house, mainly horror and science fiction. He was immediately hooked on these genres.

From 1966 to 1970, King studied English at the University of Maine at Orono. There, King wrote a column, "King's Garbage Truck", in the university magazine. He also met Tabitha Spruce there and they married in 1971. King took on odd jobs to pay for his studies. One of them was at an industrial laundry, from which he drew material for the short story "The Mangler". The campus period in his life is readily evident in the second part of Hearts in Atlantis.

After finishing his university studies with a Bachelor of Arts in English and obtaining a certificate to teach high school, King took a job as an English teacher at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. During this time he and his family lived in a trailer. Making ends meet was sometimes difficult, and the money that came from short stories, published mainly in men's magazines, was very useful. King also developed a drinking problem which stayed with him for over a decade.

During this period, King began a number of novels. One of them told the story of a young girl with psychic powers. Frustrated, he threw it into the trash. Later, he discovered that Tabitha had rescued it; she encouraged him to finish it as Carrie. He sent it to Doubleday and more or less forgot about it. Some time later, he received an offer to buy it with a $2,500 advance (not a large advance for a novel, even at that time). Shortly after, the value of Carrie was realized with the paperback rights being sold for $400,000. Before the book was published his mother died of uterine cancer, in February 1974.

In On Writing, King admits that at this time he was consistently drunk and that he was an alcoholic for well over a decade. He states that he'd based the alcoholic father in The Shining on himself, though he didn't admit that for several years.

Shortly after the publication of The Tommyknockers, King's family and friends finally intervened, dumping his trash on the rug in front of him to show him the evidence of his own addictions: beer cans, cigarette butts, grams of cocaine, Xanax, Valium, NyQuil. He sought help, and quit all forms of drugs and alcohol in the late 1980s.

King fans will note that the relative wealth of King's characters has risen through the decades, but not as precipitously as King's wealth itself: his earliest works (Carrie, The Shining, as well as much of the work in Night Shift) dealt with working-class families struggling from paycheck to paycheck in minimum-wage jobs; his late-80s work involved middle-class people like teachers and authors; his late 90s work sometimes dealt with airplane pilots, writers and others who can frequently afford a second home. All throughout, his work has remained immensely popular.

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Car accident

In the summer of 1999, King was in the middle of On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft; he'd finished the memoir section and had abandoned the book for nearly eighteen months, unsure of how to proceed or whether to bother. King reports that it was the first book that he'd abandoned since writing The Stand decades earlier. He had just decided to continue the book. On June 17, he had written up a list of questions that he was frequently asked about writing, as well as some that he wished he would be asked about it; on June 18, he had written four pages of the section on writing. On June 19, he was taking a walk after driving his son to the airport, intending to return home to go see The General's Daughter with his family. As he walked up a hill, a Dodge van crested the top on the shoulder of the road and hit him, throwing him about 14 feet (4.2 m) in the air. Bryan Smith was the driver of the van. King barely missed the driver's side support post in the van and also barely missed a spread of rocks on the ground near where he landed, either of which would likely have killed him or put him in a permanent coma. Unable to get up, King was rushed to a local hospital, which reported that they could not treat him. He was then flown to another hospital; in the helicopter he suffered a collapsed lung. In addition to the collapsed lung, King suffered a leg broken in at least nine places, a split knee, a broken right hip, four broken ribs, and a spine chipped in eight places. Coincidentally, that same year King had written most of From a Buick 8, in which one of the characters dies in an automobile accident, but King says that he "tried not to make too much of it."

King was released from the hospital after three weeks, then went through half a dozen surgeries on his leg and the accompanying physical therapy. In July 1999, he continued On Writing, though his hip was still shattered and he could sit for barely forty minutes at a stretch before the pain became intolerable. Over time his condition improved. It was reported that Mr. King forgave the driver and actually purchased the van in question for $1,500 (and later had it crushed and disposed to avoid its reappearance on eBay).

The accident, and subsequent hospitilization served as an inspiration for the pilot episode of King's ABC mini-series-turned-full-series, Kingdom Hospital.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

King incorporated his accident into the final novel of his Dark Tower series, in which the hero Roland Deschain and his friends try to stop King from being fatally injured by the van. In the story, Roland hypnotized both King and the driver in order to make them forget his appearence.

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Writing style

In King's nonfiction book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King discusses his writing style at great length and depth. King believes that, generally speaking, good stories cannot be called consciously and should not be plotted out beforehand but are better served by focusing on a single "seed" of a story and letting the story grow itself from there. King often begins a story with no idea how the story will end. He mentions in the Dark Tower series that half way through its lengthy writing period, nearly 30 years, King received a letter from a woman with cancer who asked how the book would end as she would unlikely live long enough to hear it. He stated that he didn't know. King believes strongly in this style, stating that all of his better books came from freewriting.

He is known for his great detail to continuity and inside references; many stories that may seem unrelated are often linked by secondary characters, fictional towns, or off-hand references to events in previous books. Taken as a whole, King's work (which he claims is centered around his "Dark Tower" magnum opus) creates a remarkable history that stretches from present day all the way back to the beginning of time (with a unique creation myth).

King's books are also filled with references to American history and American culture, particularly the darker, more fearful side of these. These references are generally spun into the stories of characters, often explaining their fears. Recurrent references include crime, war (especially the Vietnam War), and racism.

King is also known for his folksy, informal narration, often referring to his fans as "Constant Readers" or "friends and neighbors." He uses this style to contrast with the often gory or scary content of many of his stories.

King has a very simple formula for learning to write well: Read four hours a day and write four hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, he says, you cannot expect to become a good writer.

King also has a simple definition for talent in writing: "If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented" (from "Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully - in Ten Minutes").

Shortly after his accident, King wrote the first draft of the book "Dreamcatcher" with a notebook and a Waterman fountain pen, "the world's finest word processor". However, he normally uses an Apple PowerBook computer.

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King's recent years

In 1994, King won an O. Henry Award for his short story, "The Man in the Black Suit", and in 2003 King was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Awards. There was an uproar in the literary community over the choice of King.

"He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls. That they could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy." -Harold Bloom, a Yale professor.

Others in the writing community expressed their contempt for the literary elite's attitude. Orson Scott Card wrote "Let me assure you that King's work most definitely is literature, because it was written to be published and is read with admiration. What Snyder (former CEO of Simon & Schuster) really means is that it is not the literature preferred by the academic-literary elite." [1]

Stephen King has also written six books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. King staged a mock funeral for Bachman after the pseudonym was made public, which in turn inspired the book The Dark Half, in which a novelist stages the burial of his horror author pseudonym after having a "serious" novel published, only to find that his alter ego does not want to leave quite so easily.

King also wrote one short story under the name John Swithen - "The Fifth Quarter".

King used to play guitar in the band Rock Bottom Remainders but has not joined them on stage for some years. The band's members include: Dave Barry; Ridley Pearson; Scott Turow; Amy Tan; James McBride; Mitch Albom; Roy Blount Jr.; Matt Groening; Kathi Kamen Goldmark; and Greg Iles.

Since 2003 King has provided his take on pop culture in a column appearing on the back page of Entertainment Weekly, usually every third week.

In October of 2005, King has signed up with Marvel Comics and this is his first time in writing for the comic book medium. The negotiation will see him expanding his The Dark Tower series. The series will be illustrated by Eisner Award-winning artist Jae Lee.

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Baseball

Stephen King is a lifelong fan of the Boston Red Sox, and is frequently found at both home and away baseball games.

In his private role as father, King helped coach his son Owen's Bangor West team to the Maine Little League Championship in 1989. This experience is recounted in the New Yorker essay Head Down, which also appears in the collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes. King has called Head Down his best piece of nonfiction writing.

In 1999 King wrote The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, which involved former Red Sox team member Tom Gordon as a major character. King recently co-wrote a book entitled Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season with Stewart O'Nan. This work recounts the authors' roller coaster reaction to the Red Sox's 2004 season, a season culminating in the Sox winning the 2004 American League Championship Series and World Series.

In 2002, a Little League stadium opened in Bangor, Maine. This facility was made possible through the efforts and donations of King and his wife Tabitha.

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Family

Stephen King lives in Bangor, Maine with his wife Tabitha King, who is also a novelist. They also own a house in the Western Lakes District of Maine. He spends winter seasons in an oceanfront mansion located off the Gulf of Mexico in Sarasota, Florida. Their three children, Naomi Rachel, Joe Hill (who appeared in the film Creepshow), and Owen Phillip (now engaged), are grown and living on their own. Owen's first collection of stories, We're All in This Together: A Novella and Stories was published in 2005. The Kings are now grandparents.

Naomi shared a "ceremony of union" with her partner and theology professor, Thandeka, at a Unitarian Universalist Assembly in 2000 in Tennessee.

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Other writers

Stephen King is an open fan of the late H.P. Lovecraft and incorporated several of his techniques (such as subtle connections between all of his tales as well the more patent reoccuring use of afflicted New England towns Castle Rock and Derry for Lovecraft's Arkham, Dunwich and Innsmouth) into his novels but differs most markedly in his extensive characterisation and positively resolved endings, both notably absent in Lovecrafts writings.

Due to their immense popularity, King is often compared to Dean Koontz, and some fans often state their wishes for them to jointly write a book.

Both writers have declared the impossibility of this, and it primarily had to do with King's habit of making life miserable for his characters, and Koontz's habit of always creating a vague but happy ending.

King has written two connected novels with acclaimed horror novelist Peter Straub, The Talisman and Black House. King has indicated he and Straub will likely write the third and concluding book in this series, the tale of Jack Sawyer, but has set no timeline for its completion.

King also wrote the non-fiction book, Faithful with novelist, and fellow Red Sox fanatic, Stewart O'Nan.

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Popular culture

King has been referenced three times on the television show Family Guy. In one episode, the character of Brian runs over a person with a truck. Brian stops and says, "Oh, my God! Are you Stephen King?" to which the man replies, "No, I'm Dean Koontz." Brian gets back into his truck and drives backwards, running over Koontz again.

The second reference sees the Griffin family at an amusement park. When Stewie sees a toy clown, which is one of the prizes at a shooting game, he states, "How deliciously evil, like something out of a Stephen King novel", a reference to It.

In the third reference, King's editor is shown asking King for a summary for his 304th novel. King invents a story on the spot about a couple who are attacked by a lamp monster, then grabs the lamp from the editor's desk and waves it around making strange noises. The editor sighs, "You're not even trying anymore, are you?" and then says, "When can I have it?"

King has also been portrayed in The Simpsons. In the episode "Insane Clown Poppy", at a book fair, Marge asks King if he has been writing any new horror. King says no: "I'm working on a biography of Benjamin Franklin. He's a fascinating man. He discovered electricity, and used it to torture small animals and green mountain men. And that key he tied to the end of a kite? It opened the gates of Hell!" Marge asks him to contact her when he gets back to horror, and he writes a note to himself: "Call Marge, re: horror."

In the show Futurama, Fry was once seen walking in a library and passes a room titled "Stephen King, volumes A through Aardvark."

Also on Futurama, King is referenced on the Wizard of Oz episode. Fry, or the temporary Scarecrow, attempts to unsuccessfuly scare away some crows by reading exerpts from Christine.

A 1990 episode of Quantum Leap entitled The Boogyman involved Sam Beckett becoming a hack 60's horror writer with a teenaged friend named Stevie. Near the end of the episode, Sam discovers the kid's last name and realizes that he may have helped inspire Christine, Cujo and other early King novels.

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Bibliography

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Films and TV

King optioned his films to student filmmakers for one dollar; yet, disgusted with the treatment most of his work had gotten in film, in 1986 he decided to direct Maximum Overdrive himself, using a screenplay he had written inspired by (but not based on) his short story "Trucks." The experience seems to have satiated his desire to direct.

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See also

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External links

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