Stephen King

American · born 1947

Born Stephen Edwin King on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine, he was the second son of Donald King, a traveling vacuum salesman of Scots-Irish descent who walked out when Stephen was two, leaving his mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King, to raise the two boys through years of itinerant near-poverty across Wisconsin, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Connecticut before they settled in Durham, Maine, when he was eleven. He found his first horror in Bambi, his first novel of consequence in a bookmobile copy of Lord of the Flies, and his first publishable instinct in his elder brother David's homemade newspaper, Dave's Rag. He took an English degree from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, married the poet Tabitha Spruce in 1971, taught high school English in Hampden while writing on a portable typewriter balanced on his knees in a trailer laundry, and was on the verge of giving up Carrie when Tabitha pulled the discarded first pages from the wastebasket and told him to keep going. Doubleday paid him a $2,500 advance in 1973; the paperback rights, sold for $400,000, changed the family's life overnight. From Carrie (1974) onward came Salem's Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978), It (1986), Misery (1987), and the part-memoir, part-craft-book On Writing (2000), drafted while he recovered from being struck by a minivan on a Maine roadside in June 1999 and almost killed. He has published roughly two hundred short stories, won the O. Henry Award in 1994, the Mystery Writers' Grand Master Award in 2007, and the National Medal of Arts in 2014. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with Tabitha, writes most mornings, and remains the most-read American storyteller of his generation.