Difference between revisions of "Stephen King"

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Stephen Edwin King is a best-selling American novelist and short story writer, often considered as 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. Some of his novels take on occult themes.

Biography and first works

Stephen King was born in 1947, in Maine. He attended Lisbon High School, in Lisbon.

King's amateur press Triad and Gaslight Books, published a two part book titled "The Star Invaders" in 1964. He made is first actual published appearance in 1965 in the magazine Comics Review with his pulp story "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber." The story ran about 6,000 words in length.

In 1966, King graduated from high school and took a scholarship to attend the University of Maine. Later that summer he was already 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 bad and filed the book away.

It was arount those times that he made his first small sale with his story "The Glass Floor" for the amount of thirty-five dollars.

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.

His next idea came from the poem by Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." Due to his lack of income he was unable to further pursue the novel at great length and it too was filed away. King took a measly job of pumping gas earning $1.25 an hour. Also he earned money for his writings by submitting his short stories do men's magazines such as Cavalier.

Writing Career

On January 2, 1971, Stephen King married to 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, Maine.

Stephen King than began to work on a short story about a teenage girl named Carietta White. After a completing a few pages, King decided it was not a worthy story and crumpled the pages up and tossed them into the trash. Fortunately, his wife took the pages out and read them. She encouraged her husband to continue the story.

In January 1973, King submitted Carrie to Doubleday. In March, Doubleday bought the book and sold the paperback rights to New American Library for $400,000. Based on the book contract, Stephen King would get half of that. King quit his teaching job to pursue writing full time.

Since then, King has had numerous short stories and novels published and movies created from his work, sometimes directed by high-profile names. Worth mentioning are the film versions of "Carrie", directed by Brian de Palma; "The Shining", by Stanley Kubrick; "Misery", by Rob Reiner; and "The Shawnshank Redemption", by Frank Darabont. In his review of "The Green Mile", award-winning critic Roger Ebert wrote that "Stephen King, sometimes dismissed as merely a best-seller, has in his best novels some of the power of Dickens, who created worlds that enveloped us and populated them with colorful, peculiar, sharply seen characters. King in his strongest work is a storyteller likely to survive as Dickens has, despite the sniffs of the litcrit establishment."^[1]

In June 1999 Stephen King was severely injured in an accident that left him in critical condition with injuries to his lung, broken ribs, a broken leg and a severely fractured hip. After three weeks of operations he was released from the Central Maine Medical Center in Bangor, Maine. Stephen continues to be bedridden and requires intensive rehabilitation over the remainder of this year. He is expected to be able to walk about 9-12 months after the accident. Due to Stephen King's injuries his current projects that he was working on have been hampered and will be delayed at least a year. He relives this incident in The Dark Tower, the final book in the Dark Tower series, in which his life is saved by Jake Chambers.

In 2003 he was awarded The National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and currently collaborates for Entertainment Weekly magazine.

List of Stephen King's works

• Carrie (1974)
• Salem's Lot (1975)
• Rage (as Richard Bachman) (1977)
• The Shining (1977)
• Night Shift (1978)
• The Stand (1978)
• The Dead Zone (1979)
• The Long Walk (as Richard Bachman) (1979)
• Danse Macabre (1980) - Non-fiction
• Firestarter (1980)
• Cujo (1981)
• Roadwork (as Richard Bachman) (1981)
• Creepshow (1982)
• Different Seasons (1982)
• The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (1982)
• The Running Man (as Richard Bachman) (1982)
• Christine (1983)
• Pet Sematary (1983)
• The Talisman (1984)
• Thinner (as Richard Bachman) (1984)
• Cycle of the Werewolf (1985)
• Skeleton Crew (1985)
• The Bachman Books (1985)
• It (1986)
• Misery (1987)
• The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (1987)
• The Eyes of the Dragon (1987)
• The Tommyknockers (1987)
• The Dark Half (1989)
• Four Past Midnight (1990)
• The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition (1990)
• Needful Things (1991)
• The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands (1991)
• Dolores Claiborne (1992)
• Gerald's Game (1992)
• Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993)
• Insomnia (1994)
• Rose Madder (1995)
• The Green Mile: All 6 Parts (1996)
• The Regulators (as Richard Bachman) (1996)
• Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (1997)
• Six Stories (1997)
• Apt Pupil (1998)
• Bag of Bones (1998)
• Hearts in Atlantis (1999)
• Storm of the Century (1999)
• The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999)
• On Writing (2000) - Non-fiction
• Secret Windows (2000)
• Black House (2001)
• Dreamcatcher (2001)
• Everything's Eventual (2002)
• From a Buick 8 (2004)
• Cell (2006)
• Lisey's Story (2006)
• Blaze (as Richard Bachman) (2007)
• Duma Key (2008)

References

External Links

Stephen King: The Official Website