Stephen King Biography And Wiki
The American author Stephen King is the author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, and fantasy novels. Stephen King has sold his books for more than 350 million copies and many of them have been adapted into feature films, miniseries, television series, and comic books.
Stephen King Age And Birthday
Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine, U.S. Stephen King is 72 years old as of 2019. Stephen King celebrates his birthday on September 21, every day. Stephen King Full names: Stephen Edwin King
Stephen King Family | Parents And Siblings
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine 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 returned to Durham, Maine, where his mother cared for her parents until their deaths.
Stephen King’s mother was a caregiver in a local residential facility for the mentally challenged. King was raised Methodist but lost his belief in organized religion while in high school. Stephen King chosed to believe in the existence of God.
Stephen King Early life
During his childhood, he apparently witnessed one of his friends being struck and killed by a train, though he has no memory of the event. Stephen King was told by his family to leave home so that he may go and play with the boy, but he returned, speechless and seemingly in shock.
Only later did the family learn his friend’s death. Some commentators suggested that the event may have psychologically inspired some of his darker works, but King makes no mention of it in his memoir On Writing (2000).
Stephen King’s inspiration occurred while browsing through an attic with his elder brother when King uncovered a paperback version of an H. P. Stephen King’s Lovecraft collection of his short stories remembered as The Lurker in the Shadows, that had belonged to his father.
In his teen, years he won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award. From 1966, he went and studied at the University of Maine, and graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English.
He wrote a column known as Steve King’s Garbage Truck, for the student newspaper, The Maine Campus, and participated in a writing workshop organized by Burton Hatlen. Stephen King held a variety of jobs to pay for his studies, including janitor, gas pump attendant, and worker at an industrial laundry.
Stephen King Education
Stephen King attended Durham Elementary School and graduated from Lisbon Falls High School, in Lisbon Falls, Maine in 1966. Stephen King showed his interest in horror as an avid reader of EC’s horror comics, including Tales from the Crypt (he later paid tribute to the comics in his screenplay for Creepshow).
From 1966, King studied at the University of Maine and graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He then wrote a column Steve King’s Garbage Truck, for the student newspaper, The Maine Campus, and participated in a writing workshop organized by Burton Hatlen.
Stephen King held a variety of jobs to pay for his studies, including the janitor, gas pump attendant, and worker at an industrial laundry. King went on and met his future wife, and who was his fellow student Tabitha Spruce, at the University’s Fogler Library after one of Professor Hatlen’s workshops; they wed in 1971.
Stephen King Body Measurements
Height: ft in'(Meters or cm) Stephen King stands at a height of 1.93 m
Weight: Pounds(lbs)
in Kilograms – 76 kg
in Pounds – 167 lbs
Shoe Size: Not available
Body Shape: Chest: 38 Inches
Waist: 31 Inches
Biceps: 12 Inches
Hair Colour: White
Eye Colour: Dark Blue
Zodiac sign/Sun sign: Virgo
Stephen King Net Worth
Mitchell Rales is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy novels who has an estimated net worth of $400 million dollars as of 2019 making him one of the richest authors in the world.
Stephen King Awards
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 has sold his books for more than 350 million copies and many of them have been adapted into feature films, miniseries, television series, and comic books. He has published 58 novels and six non-fiction books of his own. He has written 200 short stories approximately, and most of which have been published in book collections.
Stephen King has received awards for his contribution as literature on 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 is known as the “King of Horror”. He sold his first professional short story called The Glass Floor to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. After he graduated from the University of Maine, he went on and earned a certificate to teach high school but, unable to find a teaching post immediately, he supplemented his laboring wage by selling his short stories to men’s magazines such as Cavalier.
Much of his stories have been republished in the collection of 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 payment for the short story The Raft, which was entitled in 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. Stephen King continued to contribute his short stories to magazines and works on the ideas of his novels. 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 on January 25, 2013,
Stephen King called for the gun owners to support the ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons, writing, “Autos and semi-autos weapons of mass destruction. You can also read Meghan King Edmonds 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.
Stephen King Carrie and aftermath
Stephen King’s novel with Carrie was accepted by publishing house Doubleday in 1973. King’s novel began as a short story intended for Cavalier magazine, but he 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. The congrats Kid of 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. Stephen King has a special cold spot in my heart for it! after his mother’s death, he and his family moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he wrote a book known as The Shining.
The family returned to western Maine in 1975, where he completed his fourth novel, The Stand. King published Different Seasons, of collection of four novellas with more serious and dramatic bent than the horror fiction for which he is famous for in the year 1982. 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, the anniversary issue which he expressed with a 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 the 1970s and early 1980s, he published a handful of 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 named King as the author of one of Bachman’s novels.
In 2006, he attended a press conference in London and 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 the 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”.
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’s 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’s 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 offered a large 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 discussed the 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, post of the World War II horror fiction had The Modern Weird Tale, critic S. T. Joshi devoted a chapter to King’s work. Despite these criticisms, Joshi argued that 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.
Stephen King often remarked that ‘Salem’s Lot was” a Peyton Place that meets Dracula. Well, it’s stuff like that, that made King so popular and helped to 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 a “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 Langoliers
Stephen King Political views and activism
In April 2008, Stephen King spoke out against HB 1423, a bill pending in the Massachusetts state legislature and 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.
Stephen King called for the gun owners to support the ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons, writing, “Autos and semi-autos weapons of mass destruction. On March 8, 2011, King spoke at a political rally in Sarasota aimed against Governor Rick Scott (R-FL), voicing his opposition to the Tea Party movement.
On April 30, 2012, King published an article in The Daily Beast calling for rich Americans, including himself, to pay more taxes, citing it as “a practical necessity and moral imperative to those who received much should be obligated to pay … in the same proportion”.
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. Stephen King criticized Donald Trump and Rep. Steve King, deeming them against racists. In June 2018 King called for the release of the Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov who is jailed in Russia.
Stephen King Philanthropy
Stephen 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
Stephen King at about 4:30 p.m. he was walking along the shoulder of Maine State Route 5, in Lovell that was on June 19, 1999, Driver Bryan Edwin Smith, distracted the unrestrained dog that was moving in the back of his minivan, struck King, who landed in a depression in the ground of about 14 feet from the pavement of Route 5.:206 The County deputy Sheriff Matt Baker said that King was hit from behind and some witnesses said the driver was not speeding, reckless, or drinking the report is according to Oxford
In his book the Writings states he was heading north, walking against the traffic. Shortly before the accident took place, a woman in the car, headed northbound, with his car in a light-blue Dodge van. After five operations in 10 days took physical therapy, that resumed work 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. Stephen King announced that he would stop writing so that he may be motivated by his frustration and injuries, which made him sit uncomfortably and reduced his stamina in 2002,
Stephen King Books
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
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
1408 2007
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
1922 2017
it 2017
The Dark Tower 2017
Stephen King TV Shows
The Stand (1994 miniseries)
Under the Dome 2013-2015
Rose Red 2002
The Dead Zone (TV series) 2002-2007
Frasier 1993-2004
Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King 2006
Storm of the Century 1999
The Langoliers 1995
Stephen King FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Who is Stephen King?
Stephen King is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, and fantasy novels.
How old is Stephen King?
Stephen King is 72 years old as of 2019.
How tall is Stephen King?
Stephen King stands at a height of 1.93 m.
Is Stephen King married?
Yes, Stephen King is married, and he is married to Tabitha Spruce on January 2, 1971.
How much is Stephen King worth?
Stephen King has an estimated net worth of $ 400 million dollars as of 2019.
How much does Stephen King make?
According to our sources, Stephen King earns an approximate income of about $40 million annually, making him one of the richest writers in the world.
Where does Stephen King live?
Stephen King lives in Bangor on West Broadway Street and the house is hard to miss. His house is a 19th-century Victorian mansion that is surrounded by a black, wrought-iron fence emblazoned with bats and spiderwebs. You can even stop and take a picture.
But don’t knock, don’t hang around, don’t come back a million times or try to look in the windows to see the author. That’s creepy.
Is Stephen King dead or alive?
Stephen King is still alive and in good health.
Where is Stephen King now?
Stephen King still lives in his home state, in a rather distinctive mansion just outside of downtown Bangor.
Is Stephen King paralyzed?
Stephen King was seriously injured when he was struck by a minivan while walking in North Lovell, Maine, Saturday, the Maine State Police said there was an eyewitness at the accident scene and King “was breathing and laying in a heap and he was all tangled and I could tell his leg was broken.”
What nationality is Stephen King?
He is of American nationality.
Stephen King Social Media
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