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Managing Editor, The Opportunistic Trader King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. His father, Donald Edwin King, a traveling vacuum salesman after returning from World War II,[10] was born in Indiana with the surname Pollock, changing it to King as an adult.[11][12] 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, New York.[15] King's parents returned to Maine towards the end of World War II, living in a modest house in Scarborough. King is of Scots-Irish descent.[16] When King was two, his father left the family. His mother raised him and his older brother David by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. They moved from Scarborough and depended on relatives in Chicago, Illinois; Croton-on-Hudson; West De Pere, Wisconsin; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Malden, Massachusetts; and Stratford, Connecticut.[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 mentally challenged.[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 home to play with the boy, King returned speechless and seemingly in shock. Only later did the family learn of the friend's death. Some commentators have suggested that this event may have psychologically inspired some of King's darker works,[21] but King makes no mention of it in his memoir On Writing (2000). King says he started writing when he was "about six or seven, just copying panels out of comic books and then making up my own stories... Film was also a major influence. I loved the movies from the start. So when I started to write, I had a tendency to write in images because that was all I knew at the time."[22] King told Terry Gross, "I've been queried a lot about where I get my ideas or how I got interested in this stuff. And at some point, a lot of interviewers just turn into Dr. Freud and put me on the couch and say, what was your childhood like? And I say various things, and I confabulate a little bit and kind of dance around the question as best as I can, but bottom line - my childhood was pretty ordinary, except from a very early age, I wanted to be scared. I just did."[23] He cites Tales From the Crypt and other horror comics as an early influence. King was a voracious reader in his youth: "I read everything from Nancy Drew to Psycho. My favorite was The Shrinking Man, by Richard Matheson â I was 8 when I found that."[24] He compared his uncle's dowsing for water to the sudden realization of what he wanted to do for a living. That inspiration occurred while browsing through an attic with his elder brother, where he discovered a box of his father's books: "The box I found that day was a treasure trove of old Avon paperbacks... The pick of the litter, however, was an H. P. Lovecraft collection from 1947 called The Lurking Fear and Other Stories... I was on my way. Lovecraftâcourtesy of my fatherâopened the way for me."[25] King remembers asking a bookmobile driver, "Do you have any stories about how kids really are?" She gave him William Golding's Lord of the Flies. It proved formative, as he recalls in his introduction to the centenary edition of the novel: "It was, so far as I can remember, the first book with handsâstrong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat. It said to me, 'This is not just entertainment; it's life or death.'... To me, Lord of the Flies has always represented what novels are for."[26] King named his town of Castle Rock after the mountain fort in Lord of the Flies, and used a quotation from it as an epigraph to Hearts in Atlantis.[27] Mark Singer writes that "He was twelve when he started submitting stories to pulp magazines, and his mother blessed this ambition, providing a secondhand typewriter that was soon missing the 'n' keyâa machine that turns up, to excruciatingly funny effect, in Misery."[28] King attended Durham Elementary School and graduated from Lisbon High School (Maine) in Lisbon Falls, Maine, in 1966.[29] He contributed to Dave's Rag, the newspaper 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 profits 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 the fanzine Comics Review, in 1965. It was republished the following year in revised form, as "In a Half-World of Terror", in another fanzine, Stories of Suspense, edited by Marv Wolfman.[30] As a teen, King also won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award.[31] In high school, King worked as a sports reporter for Lisbon's Weekly Enterprise. His editor, John Gould, gave him some advice that stayed with him: "When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all of the things that are not the story." He also said "write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."[32] King entered the University of Maine in 1966. He held a variety of jobs to pay for his studies, working as a janitor, a gas-station attendant, and an industrial laundry worker. Singer writes that "King received solid encouragement from two professors, Edward Holmes and Burton Hatlen."[28] He participated in a writing workshop organized by Hatlen, where he fell in love with Tabitha Spruce.[33] He graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English, and his daughter Naomi Rachel was born that year.[34] Stephen and Tabitha wed in 1971.[29] 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 immediately, 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 traffic cones (he was annoyed after one of the cones knocked his muffler loose), he was fined $250 for petty larceny but had no money to pay. However, a check then arrived for "The Raft" (then titled "The Float"), and King cashed it to pay the fine.[35] 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 1966â1970, he wrote a draft of his dystopian novel The Long Walk[36] and the anti-war novel Sword in the Darkness,[37] but neither of the works was published at the time; only The Long Walk was released, in 1979. 1970s: Carrie to The Dead Zone Portrait from the first edition of Carrie (1974) Portrait from the first edition of The Shining (1977) Portrait from the first edition of The Dead Zone (1979) In 1973, King's novel Carrie was accepted by Doubleday. It was King's fourth novel, but the first to be published. He recalls that "Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together." He wrote it on his wife Tabitha's portable typewriter. It began as a short story intended for Cavalier magazine, but King tossed the first three pages in the trash. 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.[38] She told him: "You've got something here. I really think you do."[39] He said: "I persisted because I was dry and had no better ideas⦠My considered opinion was that I had written the world's all-time loser."[40] Per The Guardian, Carrie "is the story of Carrie White, a high-school student with latentâand then, as the novel progresses, developingâtelekinetic powers. It's brutal in places, affecting in others (Carrie's relationship with her almost hysterically religious mother being a particularly damaged one), and gory in even more."[41] When Carrie was chosen for publication, King's phone was out of service. Doubleday editor William Thompsonâwho became King's close friendâsent a telegram to King's house in late March or early April 1973 which read: "Carrie Officially A Doubleday Book. $2,500 Advance Against Royalties. Congrats, Kid â The Future Lies Ahead, Bill."[42] King said he bought a new Ford Pinto with the advance.[43] On May 13, 1973, New American Library bought the paperback rights for $400,000, whichâin accordance with King's contract with Doubledayâwas split between them.[44] In 1976, Carrie was made into a film by Brian De Palma.[45] King was teaching Dracula to high school students and wondered what would happen if Old World vampires came to a small New England town. This was the germ of 'Salem's Lot, which King described as "Peyton Place meets Dracula."[46][47] In a 1987 interview in The Highway Patrolman, he said it was his favorite of his books, "mostly because of what it says about small towns. They are kind of a dying organism right now. The story seems sort of down home to me. I have a special cold spot in my heart for it!"[48] (In 2015, King would call Lisey's Story his favorite of his novels.)[24] In 1979, 'Salem's Lot was made into a miniseries by Tobe Hooper. After his mother's death, King and his family moved to Boulder, Colorado. He paid a visit to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park which proved influential: "My wife and I went up there in October. It was their last weekend of the season, so the hotel was almost completely empty. They asked me if I could pay cash because they were taking the credit card receipts back down to Denver. I went past the first sign that said, Roads may be closed after November 1, and I said, Jeez, there's a story up here."[22] This was the basis for The Shining, about an alcoholic writer and his family taking care of a hotel for the winter. In 1980, it was made into a film by Stanley Kubrick. King's family returned to Auburn, Maine in 1975, where he completed The Stand, an apocalyptic novel about a pandemic and its aftermath. King recalls that it was the novel that took him the longest to write, and that it was "also the one my longtime readers still seem to like the best (there's something a little depressing about such a united opinion that you did your best work twenty years ago, but we won't go into that just now, thanks.)"[49] In 1977, the family, with the addition of Owen Philip, his third and youngest child, traveled briefly to England. They returned to Maine that fall, where King began teaching creative writing at the University of Maine.[50] In 1979, he published The Dead Zone, about Johnny Smith, an ordinary man gifted with second sight. It was the first of his novels to take place in Castle Rock, Maine. In 1983, it was adapted into a film by David Cronenberg. The 1980s: Danse Macabre to The Dark Half Portrait from the first edition of Firestarter (1980) Portrait from the first edition of It (1986) Portrait from the first edition of Misery (1987) In 1981, King published Danse Macabre, an overview of the horror genre based on courses he taught at the University of Maine.[51] The following year, King published Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas with a more serious dramatic bent than the horror fiction for which he had become famous.[52] Three of its four novellas were adapted as films: The Body as Stand by Me (1986);[53] Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption as The Shawshank Redemption (1994);[54] and Apt Pupil as the film of the same name (1998).[55] The novella The Breathing Method won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.[56] King recalls "I sent them Different Seasons and [King's editor] said, well, first of all you call it seasons, and you have just written three. I wrote another one, The Breathing Method, and that was the book. I got the best reviews in my life. And that was the first time that people thought, woah, this isn't really a horror thing."[57] In 1983 he published Christine, billed as "A love triangle involving 17-year-old misfit Arnie Cunningham, his new girlfriend and a haunted 1958 Plymouth Fury."[58] It was made into a film by John Carpenter. Later that year, he published Pet Sematary, which he had written in the late 1970s and which he initially found too disturbing to publish. Per The New Republic, "The book so horrified his wife and his friend Peter Straub that they advised him against publishing it. Only when King needed a novel to get out of a contract with his publisher did he resurrect it."[59] He wrote it when his family was living near a highway that "used up a lot of animals" as a neighbor put it. His daughter's cat was killed, and they buried it in a pet cemetery (spelled "sematary") built by the local children. King imagined a burial ground beyond it that could bring the dead back to life, albeit imperfectly. In 1985, King published Skeleton Crew, a book of short fiction including "The Reach" and The Mist. King recalls crossing a bridge and thought of the fairy tale The Three Billy-Goats Gruff, "and wondered what I would do if a troll called out from beneath me, 'Who is trip-trapping upon my bridge?' All of a sudden I wanted to write a novel about a real troll under a real bridge. I stopped, thinking of a line by Marianne Moore, something about 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' only it came out 'real trolls in imaginary gardens.'"[60] He recalls that "I would be asked, 'What happened in your childhood that makes you want to write those terrible things?' I couldn't think of any real answer to that. And I thought to myself, 'Why don't you write a final exam on horror, and put in all the monsters that everyone was afraid of as a kid? Put in Frankenstein, the werewolf, the vampire, the mummy, the giant creatures that ate up New York in the old B movies. Put 'em all in there."[61] These influences would coalesce into It, about a shapeshifting monster that takes the form of its victim's fears and haunts the town of Derry, Maine. He said he thought he was done writing about monsters, and wanted to "bring on all the monsters one last timeâ¦and call it It."[62] It won the August Derleth Award and was adapted as a miniseries of the same name in 1990 and as a feature film in 2017.[63] In 1987, he published the fantasy The Eyes of the Dragon. James Smythe writes that "It's dedicated to Ben (son of Peter) Straub and Naomi King, his then-13-year-old daughter. King wrote it for her, to give her something of his to read."[64] That same year, he published Misery, about Paul Sheldon, a popular writer who is injured in a car wreck and held captive by Annie Wilkes, his self-described "number-one fan."[65] King was inspired by Evelyn Waugh's "The Man Who Liked Dickens", about a prisoner who is forced to read Charles Dickens aloud: "I wondered what it would be like if Dickens himself was held captive."[66] King recalls that "Paul Sheldon turned out to be a good deal more resourceful than I initially thought, and his efforts to play Scheherazade and save his life gave me a chance to say some things about the redemptive power of writing I had long felt but never articulated."[67] It shared the inaugural Bram Stoker Award with Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon.[68] In 1990, Misery was made into a film by Rob Reiner starring James Caan and Kathy Bates. King says Misery was also influenced by his experiences with addiction: "Annie was my drug problem, and she was my number-one fan. God, she never wanted to leave."[22] Later in 1987 he published The Tommyknockers, "a forties-style science fiction tale" he says was influenced by his drug use.[69] After the book was published, King's wife staged an intervention, which he recalls as "a kind of This is Your Life in Hell."[69] Two years later, he published The Dark Half, about an author whose literary alter-ego takes on a life of his own.[70] In the author's note, King writes that "I am indebted to the late Richard Bachman."[71] Pseudonyms In the late 1970s and early 1980s, King published a handful of short novelsâRage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man (1982) and Thinner (1984)âunder the pseudonym Richard Bachman. One explanation was that he wanted to test whether he could replicate his success again and to allay his fears that his popularity was an accident. An alternate explanation was that publishing standards at the time allowed only a single book a year. King picked up the surname from the Canadian hard rock band BachmanâTurner Overdrive, of which he is a fan.[72] Bachman's first name is a nod to Richard Stark, the pseudonym of Donald E Westlake.[73] The Bachman books are darker than King's usual fare; King called Bachman "Dark-toned, despairing...not a very nice guy." A Literary Guild member praised Thinner as "what Stephen King would write like if Stephen King could really write."[28] Richard Bachman was exposed as King's pseudonym by a persistent Washington, D.C. bookstore clerk, Steve Brown, who noticed similarities between the works and later located publisher's records at the Library of Congress that named King as the author of one of Bachman's novels.[74] This led to a press release heralding Bachman's death from "cancer of the pseudonym, a rare form of schizonomia."[75] 1996, when 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.[76] King has used other pseudonyms. The short story "The Fifth Quarter" was published under the pseudonym John Swithen (the name of a character in Carrie), by Cavalier in April 1972.[77] The story was reprinted in King's collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes in 1993 under his own name. In the introduction to the Bachman novel Blaze, King claims, 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 2016 under the pseudonym Beryl Evans, who was portrayed by actress Allison Davies during a book signing at San Diego Comic-Con,[78] 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.[79] The Dark Tower 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 initially published in five installments 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 called The Dark Tower, whose books King wrote and published infrequently over four decades (1978-2012).[80] The 1990s: Needful Things to Hearts in Atlantis In 1991, King published Needful Things, his first book since achieving sobriety, billed as "The Last Castle Rock Story".[22] In 1992, he published Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne, two novels about women loosely linked by a solar eclipse.[81] The latter novel is narrated by the title character in an unbroken monologue; Mark Singer described it as "a morally riveting confession from the earthy mouth of a sixty-six-year-old Maine coastal-island native with a granite-hard life but not a grain of self-pity."[28] King said he based the character of Claiborne on his mother, and dedicated the novel to her.[82] In 1995, it was made into a film starring Kathy Bates. In 1994, King published the short story "The Man in the Black Suit" in The New Yorker.[83] The story won the O. Henry Award in 1996.[84] In 1996, King published The Green Mile, a serial novel about a death row inmate, John Coffey. He recalls that "I wasn't sure, right up to the end of the book, if [he] would live or die. I wanted him to live, because I liked and pitied him."[85] It was made into a film by Frank Darabont. In 1998, King published of Bag of Bones, his first book with Scribner. The book was well-received, with The Denver Post calling it "the finest he's written."[86] Charles de Lint wrote that it showed King's maturation as a writer: "He hasn't forsaken the spookiness and scares that have made him a brand name, but he uses them more judiciously now... The present-day King has far more insight into the human condition than did his younger self, and better yet, all the skills required to share it with us."[87] Bag of Bones won the August Derleth Award and the Bram Stoker Award.[88][89] In 1999, King published The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, about nine-year-old Trisha McFarland, who gets lost on the Appalachian Trail and takes solace in listening to broadcasts of Boston Red Sox games. King said he wanted to write "a kind of fairy-tale, 'Hansel and Gretel' without Hansel.'"[90] Later that year, he published Hearts in Atlantis, a book of linked novellas and short stories about coming of age in the 1960s. The novella Long Men in Yellow Coats and short story "Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling" were adapted as the film Hearts in Atlantis. In an author's note, King writes that while the places in the book are fictionalized, "Although it is difficult to believe, the sixties are not fictional; they actually happened."[91] In 1999, King was hospitalized after being hit by a van. Reflecting on the incident, King wrote "it occurs to me that I have nearly been killed by a character out of one of my own novels. It's almost funny." He said his nurses were "told in no uncertain terms, don't make any Misery jokes."[92] The 2000s: On Writing to Under the Dome Stephen King at the Harvard Book Store, June 6, 2005 In 2000, King published On Writing, a mix of memoir and style manual which The Wall Street Journal called "a one-of-a-kind classic."[93] Later that year he began publishing a serialized horror novel, The Plant, in online installments.[94] At first the public assumed that King had abandoned the project because sales were unsuccessful, but King later stated that he had simply run out of stories.[95] The unfinished epistolary novel is still available from King's official site, now free. 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: "Here's the thingâpeople tire of the new toys quickly."[96] King wrote the first draft of the 2001 novel Dreamcatcher with a notebook and a Waterman fountain pen, which he called "the world's finest word processor".[97] In 2002, he published From a Buick 8, a return to the territory of Christine.[98] In 2005, King published the mystery The Colorado Kid for the Hard Case Crime imprint.[99] In 2006, King published an apocalyptic novel, Cell. The book features a sudden force in which every cell phone user turns into a mindless killer. King noted in the book's introduction that he does not use cell phones.[100] That same year, he published Lisey's Story, which he calls his favorite of his novels, because "I've always felt that marriage creates its own secret world, and only in a long marriage can two people at least approach real knowledge about each other. I wanted to write about that, and felt that I actually got close to what I really wanted to say."[24] Lisey's Story won the Bram Stoker Award.[101] King dedicated the novel to his wife.[102] In 2008, King published Duma Key, his first novel set in Florida, which won the Bram Stoker Award.[103] He also published the collection Just After Sunset, featuring 13 short pieces, including the novella N. Starting July 28, 2008, N. was released as a serialized animated series to lead up to the release of Just After Sunset.[104] In September 2009 it was announced he would serve as a writer for Fangoria.[105] In 2009, King published Ur and Throttle, a novella co-written with his son Joe Hill. King's novel Under the Dome was published on November 10 of that year. Under the Dome debuted at No. 1 in The New York Times Bestseller List.[106] Janet Maslin said "Hard as this thing is to hoist, it's even harder to put down."[107] [Invest Knowledge Media]( InvestKnowledgeMedia.com brought to you by Inception Media, LLC. This editorial email with educational news was sent to {EMAIL}. [Unsubscribe]( to stop receiving marketing communication from us. Feel free to contact us toll free Domestic/International: +17072979173 MonâFri, 9amâ5pm ET, or email us support@investknowledgemedia.com
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