Stephen Edwin King
22 min read
Reading time
4,298
Words
Published
58
Film credits
415
Books
24
Awards
Stephen King published his first novel Carrie in 1974 after his wife Tabitha rescued it from the trash. Since then, his books have never been out of print and have sold over 300 million copies. King survived a near-fatal accident in 1999 and continues to write from his home in Bangor, Maine.
Names, aliases, and relatives of Stephen King — birth name, kin, and personal ties.
Stephen King by the numbers — life, work, and family.
Stephen King — early life, career, personal life, and legacy.
Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947, at Maine General Hospital in Portland. His father Donald left when he was young; his mother Nellie raised him and brother David with help from relatives.
King started writing in January 1959, publishing a local newspaper with his brother. At Lisbon High School, he collaborated with friend Chris Chesley on a short story collection in 1963. He graduated from the University of Maine in 1970 with a degree in English.
King’s breakthrough came with the publication of Carrie in 1974, which sold paperback rights for $400,000 and allowed him to quit his teaching job. He followed with Salem’s Lot 1975 and The Shining 1977; both were adapted into films. King also wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, publishing novels like Thinner 1984.
A van hit King while he walked in June 1999, leaving him with severe injuries. He recovered and continued writing, producing works like On Writing 2000 and 11/22/63 2011. Film adaptations of his work include The Shawshank Redemption 1994 and The Green Mile 1999.
King married Tabitha Spruce on January 2, 1971. The couple has three children: Joe Hill, Owen King, and Naomi King, all writers. King struggled with cocaine addiction in the 1980s; his wife organized an intervention, and he got clean.
King lives in Bangor, Maine, in a restored Victorian mansion. He owns 17,000 books and writes three to four hours daily. He suffers from macular degeneration and fears the number 13.
King is the most successful American writer in history, with over 300 million books in print. Since Carrie 1974, his books have never been out of print. He holds the Guinness record for most film adaptations by a living author. His pseudonym Richard Bachman allowed him to test his marketability, and his Dollar Baby program lets aspiring filmmakers adapt his short stories for $1.
King has won numerous awards, including the National Book Award and the National Medal of Arts.
Browse the complete filmography of Stephen King — every film, TV show, and documentary credit, ranked by popularity.
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Every award, honor, and recognition received by Stephen King — Grammys, hall-of-fame inductions, civic honors, lifetime achievements.
Stephen King's bibliography — every authored, edited, and co-written book, ranked by edition count.
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A wall of memorable lines from Stephen King — lyrics, interviews, and off-the-cuff remarks captured over a lifetime.
I’ve Killed Enough of the World’s Trees.
I’m a Salami Writer. I Try to Write Good Salami, but Salami Is Salami.
Each Life Makes Its Own Imitation of Immortality.
When Asked, How Do You Write?, I Invariably Answer, One Word at a Time.
I Recognize Terror as the Finest Emotion and so I Will Try to Terrorize the Reader. but If I Find That I Cannot Terrify, I Will Try to Horrify, and If I Find That I Cannot Horrify, I’ll Go for the Gross Out. I’m Not Proud.
I Am the Literary Equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries.
For Every Six Crappy Poems You Read, You’ll Actually Find One or Two Good Ones. and That, Believe Me, Is a Very Acceptable Ratio of Trash to Treasure.
People Want to Know Why I Do This, Why I Write Such Gross Stuff. I Like to Tell Them I Have the Heart of a Small Boy… and I Keep It in a Jar on My Desk.
If You Don’t Have the Time to Read, You Don’t Have the Time or the Tools to Write.
Like Anything Else That Happens on Its Own, the Act of Writing Is Beyond Currency. Money Is Great Stuff to Have, but When It Comes to the Act of Creation, the Best Thing Is Not to Think of Money Too Much. It Constipates the Whole Process.
I Love the Movies, and When I Go to See a Movie That’s Been Made from One of My Books, I Know That It Isn’t Going to Be Exactly Like My Novel Because a Lot of Other People Have Interpreted It. but I Also Know It Has an Idea That I’ll Like Because That Idea Occurred to Me, and I Spent a Year, or a Year and a Half of My Life Working on It.
I Know Writers Who Claim Not to Read Their Notices, or Not to Be Hurt by the Bad Ones If They Do, and I Actually Believe Two of These Individuals. I’m One of the Other Kind I Obsess Over the Possibility of Bad Reviews and Brood Over Them When They Come. but They Don’t Get Me Down for Long; I Just Kill a Few Children and Old Ladies, and Then I’m Right as a Trivet Again.
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.
Talent Is Cheaper Than Table Salt. What Separates the Talented Individual from the Successful One Is a Lot of Hard Work.
Books and Movies Are Like Apples and Oranges. They Both Are Fruit but Taste Completely Different.
I Know a Few Writers Who Claim Not to Read Reviews, and I Actually Believe One of These Individuals. I Am the Opposite: I Anticipate Bad Reviews and Brood Over Them When They Come. but Then I Just Kill a Few Children and Old Ladies and I’m Right as a Trivet Again.
You Can Still Reconcile the Idea That Things Are Not Necessarily Going to Go Well Without Falling Back on Platitudes Like God Has a Plan and This Is for the Greater Good.
I’m in the Supermarket One Day with My Cart, and There’s This Woman, About 95. She Says, ‘I Know Who You Are. You Write Those Stories, Those Awful Horror Stories . . . I Don’t Like That. I Like Uplifting Movies Like That ‘Shawshank Redemption’. so I Said, ‘I Wrote That.’ and She Said, ‘No, You Didn’t.’ and That Was It. Talk About Surreal. I Went to Myself, for a Minute, ‘It’s Not Very Much Like My Other Stuff. Maybe I Didn’t Write It!’
Harry Potter Is About Confronting Fears, Finding Inner Strength, and Doing What Is Right in the Face of Adversity. Twilight Is How Important It Is to Have a Boyfriend.
I Was Addicted for Most of the 80S. Its Not a Terribly Long Time to Be an Addict, but It Lasted Longer Than WW2.
Having Kids Allows You to Finish off Your Own Childhood, but from a More Mature Perspective.
Never Let the Facts Get in the Way of a Good Story.
Never Write a Book Whose Manuscript Is Bigger Than Your Own Head.
You Have to Be a Little Nuts to Be a Writer Because You Have to Imagine World’s That Aren’t There.
A Short Story Is Like a Stick of Dynamite with a Tiny Fuse; You Light and That’s the End.
Writing Is the Only Thing I’m Good At. I Could Never Do Another Job.
Book Tours Are Like a Pillow Fight with All the Pillows Treated with Low Grade Poison Gas.
As a Kid, I Didn’t Talk Much, I Wrote. I’m Not Used to Externalizing My Thoughts Other Than on Paper, Which Is Typical of Writers.
One of the Reasons That I Live in Bangor Is Because If Somebody Wants to Get to Me, They Have to Be Really Dedicated.
I’m the Big Mac of Authors.
You Should Do Sex, Never Write About It.
People Ask Me When Are You Going to Write Something Serious, but That’s a Question That Hurts. That’s Like Walking up to a Black Man and Asking How It Feels to Be a Nigger.
Little-known facts about Stephen King — origins, oddities, and behind-the-scenes details from a public life.
After watching the first cut of Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me 1986, King cried and said it was the closest adaptation to one of his novels he’d ever seen.
In the 1980s King battled a cocaine addiction. His wife organized a family intervention and dumped his trashcan containing beer cans, cigarette butts, cough and cold medicines, and drug paraphernalia. She told him to get help or leave, and he got clean and sober.
King allows aspiring filmmakers to purchase the film rights to any of his short stories for one dollar. The resulting films are sent to him, and if he enjoys them, placed on a shelf marked Dollar-Babies.
Since the publication of Carrie in 1974, King’s books have never been out of print, a rare feat for an author.
King has a deal with Castle Rock where they get his work for a dollar, but he gets script approval, director approval, cast approval, and can pull the plug anytime. He gets 5% of every dollar, making 25 million dollars from The Green Mile 1999.
King owns two neighboring houses in Bangor and wanted to build an underground tunnel with a trolley between them because he could.
King wrote The Running Man, a 304-page novel, in ten days.
King revealed that he suffers from macular degeneration, a currently incurable condition that will most likely lead to blindness.
As a little boy King had a recurring nightmare of entering a room and seeing a suicide victim hanging from the ceiling, which he later incorporated into Salem’s Lot.
Not long after 9/11, someone left a package on King’s doorstep. The bomb squad incinerated it, and it turned out to be King’s novel It.
King writes for 3-4 hours a day. He used to write 2000-3000 words daily but now manages only 1000.
He will never co-author a book with his wife because he feels it would lead to divorce court.
A recovering alcoholic, King noted in his book On Writing that he was drunk virtually the whole time of writing Cujo and barely remembers writing it.
He belongs to an all-writer rock band called The Rock Bottom Remainders with authors like Amy Tan, Dave Barry, Scott Turow, Roy Blount Jr., and James Luca McBride. Their motto is, according to Barry, We play music as well as Metallica writes novels.
The question King hates most is Where do you get your ideas?
When it was discovered in 1985 that King and Richard Bachman were one and the same, he retired that pseudonym but resurrected it for The Regulators, a companion piece to Desperation. Dust jackets jokingly claim the books were posthumous discoveries by Bachman’s widow, with Bachman said to have died in 1985 from Cancer of the Pseudonym.
Guinness Superlatives certified King as having the most motion picture adaptations by a living author.
King famously disliked Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining 1980, adapted from his novel. He opposed the casting of Jack Nicholson, who did not portray the gradual descent into madness as described. He also lamented missing autobiographical elements. King produced a mini-series of The Shining 1997 that follows his novel more closely but is generally regarded as inferior to Kubrick’s version.
King scared himself with his own writing only once: when Patrick Hockstetter in It gets trapped in a refrigerator with leeches.
King invented the pseudonym Richard Bachman to see if he could market books without his more famous name.
King suffers from insomnia and later wrote a book about it.
King wants to write a novel about spiders, the thing that scares him most.
King prefers to be called Steve.
He is the most successful American writer in history.
King hit the No. 1 bestseller list 36 times and is still disappointed when he doesn’t.
The fictional town of Castle Rock is located in Maine. Stand by Me 1986 accidentally set it in Oregon because the original story The Body only mentions Castle Rock near Portland without identifying the state. The only clue in The Body that it takes place in Maine is that local radio stations begin with W, which, with few exceptions, applies only to stations east of the Mississippi River.
Because The Shining came from a very personal place, King wrote the book very quickly. He took time out from it to work on his next novel, The Stand.
King writes three drafts for every book.
All three of his children as well as his wife have followed his footsteps into writing.
Three of the houses the King family lived in had suicides occur.
In 1992, King and wife Tabitha gave a donation to build Mansfield Stadium in Bangor, Maine. His only condition was that the scoreboard be placed so he could see it from his house while working. In August 2002, he threw the first pitch at the opening of the Senior League Baseball World Series.
King worked as an English teacher before becoming a professional writer. Many of his characters are also teachers.
King has a fear of therapists, which he had to conquer during the worst of his addiction.
Newspapers reported that he bought the van that hit him in June 1999 and plans to hammer it to pieces on the anniversary of the accident.
Many of his stories take place in or near the fictional small town of Castle Rock, Maine. The first film based on a Castle Rock story was The Dead Zone 1983. Director Rob Reiner named his production company Castle Rock Entertainment.
It is falsely rumored that King will not sign autographs because of superstition. Actually, he doesn’t sign them because he hates the idolatry of celebrities and will only sign at book signings. Another rumor that he will burn books sent to him and return the ashes was debunked by his official website.
King suffers from high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums, which spared him from the Vietnam draft.
King has triskaidekaphobia, a fear of the number 13.
By 1987, the King family lived in a 24-room restored Victorian mansion.
A minivan accidentally hit King from behind while he walked on Route 5 near North Lovell, Maine. He suffered a broken leg, a bruised lung, and a head laceration. The driver was distracted by his dog. Rescuers found King lying in a depression 14 feet off the road; the van’s windshield was broken from the impact.
King has never understood why people find The Shining 1980 so scary.
King repeated the first grade due to frequent absences.
On the night King’s mother died, his son had a terrible choking fit at home. He’s had a fear of choking ever since. His mother’s death drove him further into drink.
King would like to direct a film now that he is totally sober.
King hates fame and feels uncomfortable in large crowds.
King gets depressed when people say The Stand is his best book because it was written three decades ago and implies he hasn’t written anything as good since.
King has a library of 17,000 books and has read them all except for any new additions.
In 2011, his fondness for the Harry Potter books came full circle when it was announced that Potter director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves would make a new adaptation of his novel The Stand.
People often camp outside King’s house. In April 1991, a man named Erik Keene broke in, threatening Tabitha with a bomb, claiming King stole the idea for Misery from Keene’s aunt. She ran to a neighbor and called the police. Police found Keene in the attic with a dud bomb and arrested him. The Kings increased security with a wrought-iron fence and CCTV.
King novels are criticized for having a lot of swearing, which he ironically comments on in Misery and The Tommyknockers.
Quick answers to the questions readers ask most about Stephen King.
Celebrities similar to Stephen King — same craft, ranked by reach.
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