Stephen King

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, vol. 134, pages 256-271. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.

He is an avid Red Sox fan. Before the Sox won the 2004 World Series, he said he wanted his tombstone epitaph to be a single sock and the line "Not In My Lifetime, Not In Yours, Either."

Underwent surgery to remove scar tissue and fluid from his lungs from a bout of pneumonia. [November 2003]

A huge fan of Ramones, King penned the liner notes to the 2002 Ramones tribute album, "We're A Happy Family.".

His daughter Naomi wed her 54-year-old lesbian partner Thandeka (who is a theological school teacher) in Nashville, Tennessee. [June 2000]

Newspapers reported that he has bought the van that hit him on June; he plans to hammer it to pieces on the anniversary of the accident. [September 1999]

HBO paid $1.5 million for the rights to the novel "Rose Madder". [October 1996]

Portions of King's writings from when he was 9 years old appears in the 1993 book, "First Words", edited by Paul Mandelbaum, available from Algonquin books.

In 1992 he and wife Tabitha King gave a donation to build Mansfield Stadium in Bangor, Maine. The only condition Stephen had was that the score board would be placed such that he could see it from his house while working. In August of 2002 he threw the first pitch at the opening of the Senior League Baseball World Series. The Kings were honored for their generosity with an inscribed stone monument shaped like a home plate.

In 1988 he was offered the chance to write and direct A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989).

The fictional town of Castle Rock is located in Maine. Stand By Me (1986), accidentally set it in Oregon. This is because the original story, "The Body," only mentions that Castle Rock is near Portland, without identifying which state. It is only identified as being in Maine in his other stories. The only clues in "The Body" that it takes place in Maine is the fact that the local radio stations begin with W, which, with only a few exceptions, applies only to stations east of the Mississippi River.

When it was discovered in 1985 that he and Richard Bachman were one and the same, he retired the use of that name. He resurrected Bachman about a decade later, using the name as the author of The Regulators, a companion piece to his own novel Desperation. Since then, he has issued other new novels using the name Bachman, with the dust jackets jokingly claiming the books to have been a posthumous discovery by Bachman's widow. Bachman is said to have died in 1985 from "Cancer of the Pseudonym".

Dogs are often described as monsters or -- the opposite -- victims in his books and films (like Cujo (1983) or Pet Sematary (1989)).

In the 1980s he was battling a cocaine addiction. At one time his wife organized a group of family and friends and confronted him. She dumped onto the floor his trashcan, which included beer cans, cigarette butts, cough and cold medicines and various drug paraphernalia. Her message to him was: "Get help or get out. We love you, but we don't want to witness your suicide." He got help and was able to become clean and sober.

Once said that his favorite personal horror movie was Tourist Trap (1979), and his favorite film is Of Unknown Origin (1983).

In January 1973 he submitted "Carrie" to Doubleday. In March Doubleday bought the book. On May 12 the publisher sold the paperback rights for the novel to New American Library for $400,000. His contract called for his getting half of that sum, and he quit his teaching job to pursue writing full time. The rest, as they say, is history. Since then King has had numerous short stories and novels published and movies made from his work. He has been called the "Master of Horror". His books have been translated into 33 different languages, published in over 35 different countries. There are over 300 million copies of his novels in publication. He continues to live in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, and writes out of his home.

Children: Naomi Rachel (b. 1970), Joseph Hillstrom (b. June 4, 1972) and Owen Phillip (b. February 21, 1977).

On January 2, 1971, he married Tabitha King (born Tabitha Jane Spruce).

In the fall of 1971 King took a teaching job at Hampden Academy, earning $6,400 a year. The Kings then moved to Hermon, a town west of Bangor. Stephen then began work on a short story about a teenage girl named Carietta White. After completing a few pages, he decided it was not a worthy story and crumpled the pages up and tossed them into the trash. Fortunately, Tabitha took the pages out and read them. She encouraged her husband to continue the story, which he did.

In June 1970 King graduated from the University of Maine with a Bachelor of Science degree in English and a certificate to teach high school. King's next idea came from the poem by Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. " He found bright colored green paper in the library and began work on "The Dark Tower" saga, but his chronic shortage of money meant that he was unable to further pursue the novel, and it, too, was filed away. King took a job at a filling station pumping gas for the princely sum of $1. 25 an hour. Soon he began to earn money for his writings by submitting his short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier.

In 1966 he graduated from high school and took a scholarship to attend the University of Maine. Looking back on his high school days, King recalled that "my high school career was totally undistinguished. I was not at the top of my class, nor at the bottom. " Later that summer King began working on a novel called "Getting It On", about some kids who take over a classroom and try unsuccessfully to ward off the National Guard. During his first year at college, King completed his first full-length novel, "The Long Walk. " He submitted the novel to Bennett Cerf/Random House only to have it rejected. King took the rejection badly and filed the book away. He made his first small sale--$35--with the story "The Glass Floor".

King made his first actual published appearance in 1965 in the magazine Comics Review with his story "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber. " The story ran about 6,000 words in length.

Collaborating with his best friend Chris Chesley in 1963, they published a collection of 18 short stories called "People, Places, and Things--Volume I". King's stories included "Hotel at the End of the Road", "I've Got to Get Away!", "The Dimension Warp", "The Thing at the Bottom of the Well", "The Stranger", "I'm Falling", "The Cursed Expedition", and "The Other Side of the Fog. " A year later, King's amateur press, Triad and Gaslight Books, published a two-part book titled "The Star Invaders".

Stephen attended Lisbon High School, in Lisbon, in 1962.

Stephen began his actual writing career in January of 1959, when David and Stephen decided to publish their own local newspaper named "Dave's Rag". David bought a mimeograph machine, and they put together a paper they sold for five cents an issue.

They traveled throughout many states over several years, finally moving back to Durham, Maine, in 1958.

Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, at the Maine General Hospital in Portland. His parents were Nellie Ruth (Pillsbury), who worked as a caregiver at a mental institute, and Donald Edwin King, a merchant seaman. His father was born under the surname "Pollock," but used the last name "King," under which Stephen was born. He has an older brother, David. The Kings were a typical family until one night, when Donald said he was stepping out for cigarettes and was never heard from again. Ruth took over raising the family with help from relatives.