Stephen King Biography

Dividing his childhood between his father’s family in Fort Wayne, Indiana and his mother’s in Massachusetts and Maine, horror writer King eventually settled in Maine.

His father, a merchant seaman, left suddenly, and King and his brother David were raised by their mother.

King attended the University of Maine at Orono, where he met his wife, Tabitha. In 1970 he graduated, and a year later the pair got married.

Struggling to find teaching work, he worked as a labourer, writing all the time. After many rejection letters, King published his first short story, 'I Was a Teenage Grave Robber', in Comics Review in 1967. He then began regularly publishing in men’s magazines.

Writing on weekends and evenings whilst teaching in Maine, he was largely unsuccessful, until 'Carrie' was published in 1973. His wife had fished it out of the garbage, where King had depressedly thrown it away. With the success of the novel, King became a full-time writer.

'Salems's Lot', and his masterpiece 'The Shining', followed, as did the mammoth apocalyptic work 'The Stand', in 1978. In the late 1970s, King began to write under the name of Rich Bachman.

His book of essays, 'Danse Macabre', published in 1981, was well received, and through the 1980s, he became a fully-fledged horror phenomenon, with novels such as 'Christine' (1983), 'It' (1986) and 'Misery' (1987).

Several of Kings’s works have been made into successful films such as 'Carrie', 'Stand by Me', 'The Shawshank Redemption', 'The Green Mile', 'Misery', and, most famous of all, 'The Shining'.

King now ranks as one of the most successful authors in the world. However, in his autobiography-come-manual on Writing in 2000, King admitted to severe alcoholism during the seventies, and a drug problem during the 1980s.

Seriously injured in a car accident in 1999, King recovered, attempting to pioneer internet publishing with his 'Riding the Bullet', in 2000, to mixed success.