Stephen King Biography, Age, Net worth, Early life, Influences, Horror, Movies, Books, House, Family

Stephen King Biography

Stephen King is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy born on September 21, 1947 in Portland, Maine, U.S. He is famously known as the best author, his books have sold more than 350 million copies, many of which have been adapted into feature films, miniseries, television series, and comic books.

He published 58 novels (including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman) and six non-fiction books. He has written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in book collections.

Stephen King Age

Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947 (he is 71 years old as of 2018)

Stephen King Height/Weight

Stephen King stands at a height of 1.93 m (he has a weight of 107 kg (236 pounds)

Stephen King Net worth

Mitchell Rales has an estimated net worth of $400 million.

Stephen King Family

Stephen King was born to Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King (mother) and Donald Edwin King (father). His father left the family when he was young and went to buy a pack of cigarettes leaving his mother to raise Stephen and his older brother, David, by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. His family moved to De Pere, Wisconsin, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Stratford, Connecticut. When he was 11, his family then returned 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.

Stephen King Photo

Stephen King Education

Stephen King attended Durham Elementary School and graduated from Lisbon Falls High School, in Lisbon Falls, Maine. From 1966, he studied at the University of Maine, graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English.

Stephen King Early life

At his young age, he 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. His family told him that after leaving home to play with the boy, King returned, speechless and seemingly in shock. Some commentators have suggested that this event may have psychologically inspired some of King’s darker works, but King makes no mention of it in his memoir On Writing.

His related details were his primary inspiration for writing horror fiction in his non-fiction Danse Macabre, in a chapter titled “An Annoying Autobiographical Pause.” King compares 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. He told Barnes & Noble Studios during a 2009 interview, “I knew that I’d found a home when I read that book.” King attended Durham Elementary School and graduated from Lisbon Falls High School, in Lisbon Falls, Maine.

He won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award. From 1966, he studied at the University of Maine, graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He met his future wife, fellow student Tabitha Spruce, at the University’s Fogler Library after one of Professor Hatlen’s workshops; they wed in 1971.

Stephen King Author

Stephen King books have sold more than 350 million copies, many of which have been adapted into feature films, miniseries, television series, and comic books. He has published 58 novels and six non-fiction books. He has written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in book collections. He has also received awards for his contribution to literature for his entire oeuvres, such as the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

In 2015, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts from the United States National Endowment for the Arts for his contributions to literature. He has been described as the “King of Horror”. He sold his first professional short story, “The Glass Floor,” to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. After graduating from the University of Maine, King earned a certificate to teach high school but, unable to find a teaching post immediately, initially supplemented his laboring wage by selling short stories to men’s magazines such as Cavalier.

Many of these early stories have been republished in the collection Night Shift. The short story of The Raft was published in Adam, a men’s magazine. After being arrested for driving over a traffic cone, he was fined $250 and had no money to pay the petty larceny fine Luckily payment arrived for the short story The Raft, then entitled The Float, and “All I did was cash the check and pay the fine.” In 1971, he 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.

Stephen King Carrie and aftermath

In 1973, King’s novel Carrie was accepted by publishing house Doubleday. The novel began as a short story intended for Cavalier magazine, but King tossed the first three pages of his work in the garbage can. Doubleday editor William Thompson – who would eventually become King’s close friend – sent 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 – The Future Lies Ahead, Bill.” According to King, he bought a new Ford Pinto with the money from the advance.

In 1987 the issue of The Highway Patrolman magazine, he stated, “The story seems sort of down-home to me. I have a special cold spot in my heart for it!” After his mother’s death, King and his family moved to Boulder, Colorado, where King wrote The Shining. The family returned to western Maine in 1975, where he completed his fourth novel, The Stand. In 1982, he published Different Seasons, collection of four novellas with more serious dramatic bent than the horror fiction for which King is famous. The following year, he published It, which was the best-selling hard-cover novel in the United States that year, and wrote the introduction to Batman No. 400, an anniversary issue in which he expressed his preference for that character over Superman.

Stephen King The Dark Tower books

In the 1970s, he began 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.

Stephen King Pseudonyms

In late 1970s and early 1980s, he published a handful short novels-Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man and Thinner-under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. 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. In 2006, during a press conference in London, King declared that he had discovered another Bachman novel, titled Blaze.

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. He rewrote the original manuscript in 1973 for its publication. The introduction to Bachman novel Blaze, he claimed, with tongue-in-cheek, that “Bachman” was the person using the Swithen pseudonym. It is adapted from a fictional book central to the plot of King’s previous novel The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands and published in 2016..

Stephen King Digital era

In 2000, he published online a serialized horror novel, The Plant. At first, the public presumed that King had abandoned the project because sales were unsuccessful, but King later stated that he had simply run out of stories. His novel Under the Dome was published on November 10 of that year; it is a reworking of an unfinished novel he tried writing twice in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and at 1,074 pages, it is the largest novel he has written since It. Under the Dome debuted at No. 1 in The New York Times Bestseller List.

The following month, DC Comics premiered American Vampire, a monthly comic book series written by King with short-story writer Scott Snyder, and illustrated by Rafael Albuquerque, which represents King’s first original comics work. During his Chancellor’s Speaker Series talk at University of Massachusetts Lowell on December 7, 2012, King indicated that he was writing a crime novel about a retired policeman being taunted by a murderer.

Later, on June 20, 2013, while doing a video chat with fans as part of promoting the upcoming Under the Dome TV series, King mentioned he was halfway through writing his next novel, Revival, which was released November 11, 2014. During his tour to promote the End of Watch, he revealed that he had collaborated on a novel, set in a women’s prison in West Virginia, with his son, Owen King to be titled Sleeping Beauties.

Stephen King Collaborations

Writings
Stephen King has written two novels with horror novelist Peter Straub: The Talisman and a sequel, Black House. He 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 deadline for its completion. Alfred A. Knopf released it in a general trade edition and the short story was later included in King’s collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes published in 1993. The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red was a paperback tie-in for the King-penned miniseries Rose Red.

The novel tie-in idea was repeated on Stephen King’s next project, the miniseries Kingdom Hospital. Richard Dooling, King’s collaborator on Kingdom Hospital and writer of several episodes in the miniseries, published a fictional diary, The Journals of Eleanor Druse, in 2004. Eleanor Druse is a key character in Kingdom Hospital, much as Dr. Joyce Readon and Ellen Rimbauer are key characters in Rose Red.

Stephen King Music

Stephen King is a fan of the Ramones, to the extent that he wrote the liner notes for the 2003 Ramones tribute album We’re a Happy Family. Non-fiction references include a mention in King’s book Danse Macabre where he calls the Ramones “An amusing punk-rock band that surfaced some four years ago”. 41 King included further Ramones references in his fictional work. Entertainment Weekly, for example, in their review of Black House by King and Peter Straub, note that King’s “Trademark references” are in evidence, quoting Dee Dee Ramone.

In turn, the Ramones have referenced King on their song “It’s Not My Place”, from their Pleasant Dreams album of 1981 in the line: “Ramones are hangin’ out in Kokomo / Roger Corman’s on a talk show / With Allan Arkush and Stephen King”. Further, Dee Dee Ramone wrote the song “Pet Sematary” in King’s basement after King handed him a copy of the novel. In 2012, he collaborated with musician Shooter Jennings and his band Hierophant, providing the narration for their album, Black Ribbons.

Stephen King Analysis

Writing style
Stephen King formula for learning is to write well and “Read and write four to six hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can’t expect to become a good writer.” He sets out each day with a quota of 2000 words and he doesn’t stop writing until it is met. He 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.”

Stephen King Influences

Stephen King has called Richard Matheson “The author who influenced me most as a writer.” In a current edition of Matheson’s The Shrinking Man, King is quoted: “A horror story if there ever was one…a great adventure story-it is certainly one of that select handful that I have given to people, envying them the experience of the first reading.” Ray Bradbury is another influence, with King himself stating “Without Ray Bradbury, there is no Stephen King”. 143-4 There are also several examples of King’s referring to Lovecraftian characters and settings in his work, such as Nyarlathotep and Yog-Sothoth.

His book 11/22/63 mentions the Jackson story “The Summer People”. He is a fan of John D. MacDonald, and dedicated the novella “Sun Dog” to MacDonald, saying “I miss you, old friend.” For his part, MacDonald wrote an admiring preface to Night Shift, and even had his famous character, Travis McGee, reading Cujo in one of the last McGee novels and Pet Sematary in the last McGee novel, The Lonely Silver Rain. In his fore note to the novel, he wrote, “Don Robertson was and is one of the three writers who influenced me as a young man who was trying to ‘become’ a novelist.” Robert A. Heinlein’s book The Door into Summer is repeatedly mentioned in King’s Wolves of the Calla, as are several other works.

Wolves of the Calla is the King work in which The Dark Tower begins to follow a meta-fictional path. In his interview, he was published in the USA Weekend in March 2009, the author stated, “People look on writers that they like as an irreplaceable resource. I do. Elmore Leonard, every day I wake up and not to be morbid or anything, although morbid is my life to a degree-don’t see his obituary in the paper, I think to myself,”Great! He’s probably working somewhere.

Stephen King Critical response

Science fiction editors John Clute and Peter Nichols offer a largely favorable appraisal of King, noting his “Pungent prose, sharp ear for dialogue, disarmingly laid-back, frank style, along with his passionately fierce denunciation of human stupidity and cruelty him among the more distinguished ‘popular’ writers.” In his book The Philosophy of Horror, Noël Carroll discusses King’s work as an exemplar of modern horror fiction Analyzing both the narrative structure of King’s fiction and King’s non-fiction ruminations on the art and craft of writing, Carroll writes that for King, “The horror story is always a contest between the normal and the abnormal such that the normal is reinstated and affirmed.”

In his analysis of post-World War II horror fiction, The Modern Weird Tale, critic S. T. Joshi devotes a chapter to King’s work. Despite these criticisms, Joshi argues that since Gerald’s Game, King has been tempering the worst of his writing faults, producing books that are leaner, more believable and generally better written. In his short story collection A Century of Great Suspense Stories, editor Jeffery Deaver noted that King “Singlehandedly made popular fiction grow up. While there were many good best-selling writers before him, King, more than anybody since John D. MacDonald, brought reality to genre novels. He has often remarked that ‘Salem’s Lot was”Peyton Place meets Dracula.

Well, it’s stuff like that that has made King so popular, and helped free the popular name from the shackles of simple genre writing. Some in the literary community expressed disapproval of the award: Richard E. Snyder, the former CEO of Simon & Schuster, described King’s work as “non-literature” and critic Harold Bloom denounced the choice: The decision to give the National Book Foundation’s annual award for “distinguished contribution” to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. Others came to King’s defense, such as writer Orson Scott Card, who responded: Let me assure you that King’s work most definitely is literature because it was written to be published and is read with admiration.

Stephen King Political views and activism

In April 2008, King spoke out against HB 1423, a bill pending in the Massachusetts state legislature that would restrict or ban the sale of violent video games to anyone under the age of 18. He called the proposed law an attempt by politicians to scapegoat pop culture and to act as surrogate parents to other people’s children, which he asserted was usually “Disastrous” and “Undemocratic”. During the 2008 presidential election, King voiced his support for Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

On January 25, 2013, King published an essay titled “Guns” via Amazon.com’s Kindle single feature, which discusses the gun debate in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. He called for gun owners to support the ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons, writing, “Autos and semi-autos are weapons of mass destruction…When lunatics want to make war on the unarmed and unprepared, these are the weapons they use.” The essay became the fifth-bestselling non-fiction title for the Kindle. He criticized Donald Trump and Rep. Steve King, deeming them racists. In June 2018 King called for the release of the Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov who is jailed in Russia.

Stephen King Philanthropy

King has stated that he donates approximately $4 million per year “to libraries, local fire departments that need updated lifesaving equipment (Jaws of Life tools are always a popular request), schools, and a scattering of organizations that underwrite the arts. The Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, chaired by the author and his wife, ranks sixth among Maine charities in terms of average annual giving with over $2.8 million in grants per year, according to The Grantsmanship Center. In November 2011, the STK Foundation donated $70,000 in matched funding via his radio station to help pay the heating bills for families in need in his home town of Bangor, Maine, during the winter.

Stephen King Car accident

On June 19, 1999, at about 4:30 p.m., King was walking on the shoulder of Maine State Route 5, in Lovell, Maine. Driver Bryan Edwin Smith, distracted by an unrestrained dog moving in the back of his minivan, struck King, who landed in a depression in the ground about 14 feet from the pavement of Route 5.:206 According to Oxford County Sheriff deputy Matt Baker, King was hit from behind and some witnesses said the driver was not speeding, reckless, or drinking. In his book On Writing, King states he was heading north, walking against the traffic.

Shortly before the accident took place, a woman in a car, northbound, his car first in a light-blue Dodge van. After five operations in 10 days and physical therapy, he resumed work on On Writing in July, though his hip was still shattered and he could sit for only about 40 minutes before the pain became unbearable. The driver of the vehicle that struck King, Bryan Edwin Smith, was found dead at his Maine home in September 2000 in an apparent suicide. In 2002, he announced he would stop writing, apparently motivated in part by frustration with his injuries, which had made sitting uncomfortable and reduced his stamina.

Stephen King Books

It 1996
Pet Sematary 1983
The Stand 1978
The Shining 1977
The Outsider 2018
Misery 1987
Carrie 1974
The Green Mile 1996
‘Salem’s Lot 1975
Christine 1983
The Long Walk 1979
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger 1982
Cujo 1981
The Talisman (King and Straub novel) 1984
The Body 1982
Under the Dome 2009
Mr. Mercedes 2014
The Mist 1980
Different Seasons 1982
The Dead Zone 1979
Gerald’s Game 1992
Desperation 1996
Cell 2006
Bag of Bones 1998
Dreamcatcher 2001

Stephen King Movies

Graveyard Shift 1990
Hearts in Atlantis 2001
Riding the Bullet 2004
Needful Things 1993
Cat’s Eye 1985
Dolores Claiborne 1995
The Running Man 1987
Sleepwalkers 1992
Salem’s Lot 1979
Carrie 1976
Maximum Overdrive 1986
Thinner 1996
Cujo 1983
Children of the Corn 1984
1408 2007
The Shining 1980
Pet Sematary 1989
The Green Mile 1999

Stephen King Horror

The Mangler Reborn 2005
The Rage: Carrie 2 1999
Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace 1996
Sometimes They Come Back… Again 1996
Sometimes They Come Back… For More 1998
Quicksilver Highway 1997
Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror 1998
Tales from the Darkside: 1990
The Night Flier 1997
Creepshow 2 1987
1922 2017
Needful Things 1993
Secret Window 2004
Silver Bullet 1995
Cat’s Eye 1985
The Mist
It 1990
it 2017
The Dark Tower 2017

Stephen King Biography, Age, Net worth, Early life, Influences, Horror, Movies, Books, House, Family