King, Stephen
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Wikipedia-Article "Stephen King"
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For other people named Stephen King, see Stephen King (disambiguation).
Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author best known for horror novels. A 2003 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Awards, King's books have been enormously successful, and are often featured on bestseller lists.
King's stories frequently involve an unremarkable protagonist such as a middle-class family, a child, or many times, a writer. The characters are involved in their everyday lives, but the supernatural encounters and extraordinary circumstances escalate over the course of the story. 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. He also writes stories that cannot be considered horror, 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.
His upcoming works include Cell, to be released in January 2006, The Secretary of Dreams (graphic collection), a limited edition to be released in the first half of 2006 by Cemetery Dance Publications, and Lisey's Story to be released in October.
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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. 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 Union, Connecticut. King attended Durham Elementary School and nearby Lisbon High School.
King has been writing since an early age. When in school, he wrote stories based on movies he had 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 a 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. At the university, he wrote a column titled "King's Garbage Truck" in the university magazine. He also met Tabitha Spruce; they married in 1971. King took on odd jobs to pay for his studies, including one at an industrial laundry. He used the experience to write 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 taught English at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. During this time, he and his family lived in a trailer. He wrote short stories (most were published in men's magazines) to help make ends meet. As told in the introduction in Carrie, if one of his kids got a cold, Tabitha would joke, "Come on Steve, think of a monster." 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 his first ideas was of a young girl with psychic powers. However, he grew discouraged, and threw it into the trash. Tabitha later rescued it and encouraged him to finish it. After completing the novel, he titled it Carrie, sent it to Doubleday, and more or less forgot about it. 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 (with $200,000 of it going to the publisher). Shortly after its release, his mother died of uterine cancer. She had the novel read to her before she died.
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 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, The Stand, as well as much of the work in Night Shift), deal with working-class families struggling from paycheck to paycheck in minimum-wage jobs.
- Late-1980s work involved middle-class people like teachers and authors
- Late-1990s work sometimes dealt with airplane pilots, writers and others who can frequently afford a second home.
Car accident
In the summer of 1999, King was in the middle of On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. At the time, he had 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, Bryan Smith, who was driving a Dodge van, hit him, throwing him about 14 feet (4.2 m) in the air. King barely missed the driver's side support post in the van and 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, eariler that year King had finished most of From a Buick 8, a novel where one of the characters dies in an automobile accident. Of the eerie similarities, King says that he tries "not to make too much of it."
King was released from the hospital after three weeks and 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 only sit for barely forty minutes at a stretch before the pain became intolerable. Over time, his condition improved. It was reported that King forgave the driver and purchased the van in question for $1,500 (and later had it crushed and disposed to avoid its reappearance on eBay).
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 appearance.
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, halfway through its lengthy writing period (nearly 30 years), King received a letter from a woman with cancer who asked how the book would end, because she would unlikely live long enough to read it. He stated that he didn't know. King believes strongly in this style, stating that his best writing comes from freewriting.
He is known for his great eye to detail, for continuity, and for 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. Read 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, you can't 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." He normally uses an Apple PowerBook computer.
World view
King's horror novels often reflect and are constructed upon a consistent view of the world, which is most clearly described in Insomnia and The Dark Tower.
In this view, he describes existence as being metaphorically like a dark tower, set in a huge landscape of red flowers. In this tower are many levels, with entities on each level. Some are hostile, some benevolent. Human life and all that people are aware of, lives on the equivalent of the bottom two levels of the tower.
In Insomnia, King describes these entities as forces of the Purpose (good), and the Random (evil). Most events in life do not interest them, and are relatively unimportant. However a few events matter to their ongoing strategic conflicts, and a very few, such as that described in the above book, are able to shake the entire tower of existence by virtue of their significance.
The concept of the world as a thin facade, with inhuman entities from outside stems back to Lovecraft and his mythos.
King's recent years
In 1996, King won an O. Henry Award for his short story, "The Man in the Black Suit." 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 2005, King has signed up with Marvel Comics; this will be his first time 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. Marvel recently announced the series was delayed until 2007 in order for King to give it the attention it deserves. This is not the first time he has written comics though.
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.
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. King recently built a home on Hamilton Reservoir in Union, CT. Their three children, Naomi Rachel, Joe Hill (who appeared in the film Creepshow), and Owen Phillip, 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.
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, effective dialogue, and positively resolved endings, all notably absent in Lovecrafts writings.
Edgar Allan Poe, one of the fathers to the contemporary literary horror genre, exerts a noticeable influence over King's writing as well. One of the best examples of this is shown with The Shining. The mangled phrase, "And the red death held sway over all," hearkens back to the original, "And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all," from Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." King's novel parallels Poe's short story fairly accurately. The two men also share the common theme of the doppelganger, although one might argue that this is prevalent throughout the entire horror genre and cannot be relegated as specific to one author.
King has also openly declared his admiration for another, far less prolific author: Shirley Jackson. The novel Salem's Lot opens with a quotation from Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Tony, an imaginary playmate from The Shining bears a striking resemblance to another imaginary playmate with the same name from Jackson's Hangsaman. There are also many simularities between the character of Carrie from Carrie and that of Eleanor from The Haunting of Hill House.
Due to their immense popularity, King is often compared to Dean Koontz, and some fans often have wished for the two to jointly write a book. Both writers have declared the impossibility of this, the primary reasons being 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 that 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.
Popular culture
King has been referenced three times on the television show Family Guy.
- When Brian runs over a person with a truck, he stops and says, "Oh, my God! Are you Stephen King?" The man replies, "No, I'm Dean Koontz." Brian gets back into his truck and drives backwards, running over Koontz again.
- While the Griffin family is at an amusement park, Stewie sees a toy clown, which is one of the prizes at a shooting game. He says, "How deliciously evil, like something out of a Stephen King novel", a reference to It.
- In that same episode, just after Stewie mocks the toy clown, the episode moves into a "flashback" mode. King's editor is shown asking King for a summary for his 300th 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 and says, "You're not even trying anymore, are you?" and then says, "When can I have it?"
In Futurama:
- Fry walks in a library and passes a room titled "Stephen King, volumes A through Aardvark"
- In another episode, King is referenced on a Wizard of Oz episode. Fry (the temporary Scarecrow) attempts to unsuccessfuly scare away some crows by reading excerpts from Christine.
King makes a small cameo as himself 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."
A 1990 episode of Quantum Leap titled 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, The Dark Half, and other early King novels.
A 2005 episode of South Park involves Cartman. Cartman, who suffers from head trauma, claims that he can now use his psychic abilities to solve murders. A man in a black raincoat is seen at every murder scene. While Cartman isn't the person to put the two together, the man is a reference to Frank Dodd, who is a murderer in The Dead Zone and Cujo.
In the Cartoon Network show The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, Billie gets a haunted tricycle from a haunted outhouse that leads to another dimension. After Billy gets mocked by his peers, the tricycle, which Billie calls "Trykie," goes a a spree across the town, never killing, but leaving nasty tire marks and an irreversible wedgie, likely inspired by Christine.
In the Ramones song "It's not my place (in the 9 to 5 world)" from the albums Pleasant Dreams (1981) and Ramones Anthology Disc 2 (1999): "Roger Corman's on a talk show/With Allan Arkush and Stephen King, you know."
Bibliography
- 1963 The Aftermath (an unpublished novel)
- 1970 Sword in the Darkness (an unpublished novel)
- 1973 Blaze (an unpublished novel)
- 1974 Carrie
- 1975 'Salem's Lot
- 1977 Rage (as Richard Bachman)
- 1977 The Shining
- 1978 Night Shift (stories)
- 1978 The Stand
- 1979 The Dead Zone
- 1979 The Long Walk (as Richard Bachman)
- 1980 Firestarter
- 1981 Cujo
- 1981 Danse Macabre (nonfiction about horror)
- 1981 Road Work (as Richard Bachman)
- 1982 Creepshow (comic book, illustrated by Bernie Wrightson)
- 1982 The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
- 1982 Different Seasons (novellas)
- 1982 The Running Man (as Richard Bachman)
- 1983 Christine
- 1983 Pet Sematary
- 1983 Cycle of the Werewolf (illustrated by Bernie Wrightson)
- 1984 The Talisman (written with Peter Straub)
- 1984 Thinner (as Richard Bachman)
- 1985 Skeleton Crew (stories)
- 1985 The Bachman Books (novel collection)
- 1986 It
- 1987 The Eyes of the Dragon
- 1987 Misery
- 1987 The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
- 1988 The Tommyknockers
- 1988 Nightmares in the Sky (gargoyle photo book with text by King; photos by f-stop fitzgerald)
- 1989 The Dark Half
- 1989 Dolan's Cadillac (limited edition)
- 1989 My Pretty Pony (limited edition)
- 1990 The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition
- 1990 Four Past Midnight (stories)
- 1991 Needful Things
- 1991 The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
- 1992 Gerald's Game
- 1993 Dolores Claiborne
- 1993 Nightmares & Dreamscapes (stories)
- 1994 Insomnia
- 1995 Rose Madder
- 1995 Umney's Last Case
- 1996 The Green Mile (originally published as a monthly serial consisting of six parts: The Two Dead Girls, The Mouse on the Mile, Coffey's Hands, The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix, Night Journey, and Coffey on the Mile)
- 1996 Desperation
- 1996 The Regulators (as Richard Bachman)
- 1997 Six Stories (stories)
- 1997 The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
- 1998 Bag of Bones
- 1999 Storm of the Century
- 1999 The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
- 1999 The New Lieutenant's Rap (limited edition)
- 1999 Hearts in Atlantis
- 1999 Blood and Smoke (audio book)
- 2000 Riding the Bullet (electronically published novella)
- 2000 The Plant (electronically published) Stephen King (Publishing of 'The Plant')
- 2000 Secret Windows
- 2000 On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (nonfiction and autobiography)
- 2001 Dreamcatcher
- 2001 Black House (sequel to The Talisman; written with Peter Straub)
- 2002 From a Buick 8
- 2002 Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales (stories)
- 2003 The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger (revised version)
- 2003 The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
- 2004 The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
- 2004 The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
- 2004 Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season
- 2005 The Colorado Kid, published in October by Hard Case Crime
- 2006 Cell, to be released in January
- 2006 The Secretary of Dreams (graphic collection), a limited edition to be released in the first half of 2006 by Cemetery Dance Publications
- 2006 Lisey's Story, to be released in October
- 2007 the Dark Tower comic book, to be released in February by Marvel Comics
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.
See also
- Books about Stephen King
- Castle Rock, Maine
- Derry, Maine
- List of bestselling novels in the United States
- Philtrum Press
- Randall Flagg
- Dark Tower
External links
- Stephen King's Official Web Site
- Stephen & Tabitha King Foundation
- Stephen King News Web Site
- Scribner, Stephen King's publisher
- Stephen King at the Internet Movie Database
- Stephen King at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Recommended by Stephen King: 100 Books (German / English)
- Recommended by Stephen King: 100 Movies (German / English)
- Stephen King's Russian Fan Page
- Reviews of films based on Stephen King's works
- O.Henry Award Winners
- Stephen King Biography
- Stephen King Short Movies