Stephen King - Biography

Last Editor: jpetrone				Stephen King Biography -   Name : Stephen King Profession : Author Birth Details : born September 21, 1947 Birth name : Stephen Edwin King Height : 6' 4" (1.93 m) Nickname : The King The King of horror Personal quotes : "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 li Spouse : Tabitha King (2 January 1971 - present) 3 children Trade mark : Usually sets stories in Maine. Most of his lead male characters are writers. Almost always has a cameo in the movies or mini-series based on his

Stephen King Trivia -

Newspapers reported that he has bought the van that hit him on June; he plans to hammer it to pieces on the anniversary of the accident. [September 1999] King was accidentally hit in the back by a minivan while walking on Route 5 near North Lovell, Maine. He suffered a broken leg, a bruised lung and a head laceration. The driver of the van was distracted by his dog. King was found lying in a depression about 14 feet off the road and appeared to have been thrown by the collision. The van's windshield was broken and the right front corner of the car was crunched in from the impact of striking King. [19 June 1999] Revealed that he is suffering from macular degeneration, a currently incurable condition which will most likely lead to blindness. [May 1999] Estimated annual salary is $40 million. [May 1999] HBO has paid $1.5 million for the rights to the novel 'Rose Madder'. [October 1996] King has never censored his own work. The death scene of the doctor in novel "'Salem's Lot" was cut due to the demands of the editor at Doubleday. King published six novels (Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man, Thinner and The Regulators) under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Portions of King's writings from when he was 9 years old appears in the 1993 book, "First Words", edited by Paul Mandelbaum, available from Algonquin books. Supposedly created his pseudonym Richard Bachman by reading a novel by Donald E. Westlake, whose pseudonym is Richard Stark, while listening to Bachman-Turner-Overdrive. Likes to have cameos in his movies (big screen and TV). It is falsely rumored that Stephen will not sign autographs because of superstition. Actually, he does not 'do autographs' because he hates the idolatry of celebrities. (He also will not endorse an official fan club for the same reason.) He will sign autographs now only at book signings, according to his official website. Met his wife Tabitha King while the two were working at the Fogler Library as students at the University of Maine in Orono, Maine. Used to work for a dry cleaner before publishing his first novel. His daughter Naomi wed her 54 year old lesbian partner Thandeka (who is a theological school teacher) in Nashville, Tennessee. [June 2000] Bryan Smith, the driver of the van which hit Stephen King, dies. Stephen King said in statement "I was very sorry to hear of the passing of Bryan Smith, the death of a 43-year-old man can only be termed untimely." [26 September 2000] Scored in the 1300s on the SAT. Children: Naomi Rachel (b. 1972), Joseph Hillstrom (b. 1974) and Owen Phillip (b. 1979). Wrote The Running Man, a 304 page novel, in only ten days. Owns three radio stations in Maine (one has been named AP Station of the Year more than once) Online at zoneradio.com Certified by Guinness Superlatives (the "Book of World Records" group) as having the most number of motion picture adaptations by a living author. In 1992, Stephen and Tabitha King gave a donation to build Mansfield Stadium in Bangor, Maine. In August, 2002, he threw the first pitch at the opening of the Senior League Baseball World Series. The Kings were honored for their generosity with an inscribed stone monument shaped like a home plate. Contributed a short monologue to two versions of the Blue �yster Cult song "Astronomy" (from the out-of-print "Imaginos" album) on a promotional CD single. His short story "The Man in the Black Suit" won an O. Henry Award for Best Short Story in 1996. - Underwent surgery to remove scar tissue and fluid from his lungs from a bout of pneumonia. [25 November 2003] Owns a house on Sanibel Island, Florida Once said that his favorite personal horror movie was Tourist Trap (1979), and his favorite film is Of Unknown Origin (1983) Dogs are often described as monsters or -- the opposite -- victims in his books and films (like Cujo (1983) or Pet Sematary (1989)). He is an avid Red Sox fan. Before the Sox won the 2004 World Series, he said he wanted his tombstone epitaph to be a single sock and the line "Not In My Lifetime, Not In Yours, Either." King is the most successful American writer in history. Often listens to hard rock music during the time he writes to get inspired. He also plays in a rock band himself. A recovering alcoholic, King noted in his book "On Writing" that he was drunk virtually the whole time of writing the book Cujo and, to this day, barely remembers writing any of it. In the eighties, he was battling a cocaine addiction. At one time, his wife organized a group of family and friends and confronted him. She dumped onto the floor his trash can, which included beer cans, cigarette butts, cough and cold medicines and various drug paraphernalia. Her message to him was: get help or get out. We love you, but we don't want to witness your suicide. He got help and was able to become clean and sober. Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, vol. 134, pages 256-271. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005. Is good friends with horror director George A. Romero. Stephen belongs to a an all-writer rock band called "Rock Bottom Remainders" with other such writers as Amy Tan, Dave Berry, Scott Turow, Roy Blount Jr. and James McBride. Their motto is , according to Dave Berry, "We play music as well as Metallica writes novels." A huge fan of The Ramones, King penned the liner notes to the 2002 Ramones tribute album, "We're A Happy Family." Writes reviews of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series for Entertainment Weekly magazine. Is an avid AC/DC fan The fictional town of Castle Rock is located in Maine. Stand by Me, the first film to be set in that town accidentally set it in Oregon. This is because the original story, The Body, only mentions that Castle Rock is near Portland, without identifying which state. It is only identified as being in Maine in his other stories. The only clues in The Body that it takes place in Maine is the fact that the local radio stations begin with W, which, with only a few exceptions, applies only to stations east of the Mississippi River. Many of his stories take place in or near the fictional small town of Castle Rock, Maine. The first film to be based on a Castle Rock story was Stand by Me. Director Rob Reiner subsequently named his production company Castle Rock Entertainment.

Stephen King Detailed Biography -

Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author best known for his highly successful horror novels. A 2003 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Awards, King's books have been enormously successful, and are often featured on bestseller lists. King's stories frequently involve an unremarkable protagonist such as a middle-class family, a child, or many times, a writer. The characters are involved in their everyday lives, but the supernatural encounters and extraordinary circumstances escalate over the course of the story. King evinces a thorough knowledge of the horror genre, as shown in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, which chronicles several decades of notable works in both literature and cinema. He also writes stories that cannot be considered horror, including the novellas The Body and Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (later adapted as the movies Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, respectively), as well as The Green Mile. Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine and is of Scots-Irish ancestry. When King was two years old, his father deserted his family. Ruth raised King and his adopted older brother David by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. The family moved to Ruth's home town of Durham, Maine but also spent brief periods in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Stratford, Connecticut. King attended Durham Elementary School and Lisbon High School. He grew to stand 6'4" tall. King has been writing since an early age. When in school, he wrote stories based on movies he had seen recently and sold them to his friends. This was not popular among his teachers, and he was forced to return his profits when this was discovered. The stories were copied using a mimeo machine that his brother David used to copy a newspaper, "Dave's Rag," which he self-published. "Dave's Rag" was about local events, and King would often contribute. At around the age of thirteen, King discovered a box of his father's old books at his aunt's house, mainly horror and science fiction. He was immediately hooked on these genres. From 1966 to 1971, King studied English at the University of Maine at Orono. At the university, he wrote a column titled "King's Garbage Truck" in the university magazine. He also met Tabitha Spruce; they married in 1971. King took on odd jobs to pay for his studies, including one at an industrial laundry. He used the experience to write the short story "The Mangler". The campus period in his life is readily evident in the second part of Hearts in Atlantis. After finishing his university studies with a Bachelor of Arts in English and obtaining a certificate to teach high school, King taught English at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. During this time, he and his family lived in a trailer. He wrote short stories (most were published in men's magazines) to help make ends meet. As told in the introduction in Carrie, if one of his kids got a cold, Tabitha would joke, "Come on Steve, think of a monster". King also developed a drinking problem which stayed with him for over a decade. During this period, King began a number of novels. One of his first ideas was of a young girl with psychic powers. However, he grew discouraged, and threw it into the trash. Tabitha later rescued it and encouraged him to finish it. After completing the novel, he titled it Carrie, sent it to Doubleday, and more or less forgot about it. Later, he received an offer to buy it with a $2,500 advance (not a large advance for a novel, even at that time). Shortly after, the value of Carrie was realized with the paperback rights being sold for $400,000 (with $200,000 of it going to the publisher). Shortly after its release, his mother died of uterine cancer. She had the novel read to her before she died. In On Writing, King admits that at this time he was consistently drunk and that he was an alcoholic for well over a decade. He states that he had based the alcoholic father in The Shining on himself, though he did not admit it for several years. Shortly after the publication of The Tommyknockers, King's family and friends finally intervened, dumping his trash on the rug in front of him to show him the evidence of his own addictions: beer cans, cigarette butts, grams of cocaine, Xanax, Valium, NyQuil. He sought help, and quit all forms of drugs and alcohol in the late 1980s. King fans note that the relative wealth of King's characters has risen through the decades, but not as precipitously as King's wealth itself: His earliest works (Carrie, The Shining, The Stand, as well as much of the work in Night Shift), deal with working-class families struggling from paycheck to paycheck in minimum-wage jobs. Late-1980s work involved middle-class people like teachers and authors Late-1990s work sometimes dealt with airplane pilots, writers and others who can frequently afford a second home. In the summer of 1999, King was in the middle of On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. At the time, he had finished the memoir section and had abandoned the book for nearly eighteen months, unsure of how to proceed or whether to bother. King reports that it was the first book that he'd abandoned since writing The Stand decades earlier. He had just decided to continue the book. On June 17, he had written up a list of questions that he was frequently asked about writing, as well as some that he wished he would be asked about it; on June 18, he had written four pages of the section on writing. On June 19, about 4:30 PM, he was walking on the right shoulder of Route 5 in North Lovell. Driver Bryan Smith, distracted by an unrestrained Rottweiler moving in the back of his 1985 Dodge Caravan, struck King, who landed in a depression about 14 feet (4 meters) from the pavement of Route 5. Oxford County Sheriff's deputy Matt Baker recorded that witnesses said the driver was not speeding or reckless. Baker also reported that King was struck from behind. King's official website, however, states that this was incorrect, and that King was walking facing traffic. King was conscious enough to give the deputy phone numbers to contact his family, but in considerable pain. The author was first transported to Northern Cumberland Hospital and then flown by helicopter to Central Maine Hospital. His injuries - a collapsed right lung, multiple fractures of the right leg, scalp laceration, and a broken hip - kept him in Central Main Medical Center until July 9, almost three weeks later. Earlier that year King had finished most of From a Buick 8, a novel where one of the characters dies in an automobile accident. Of the eerie similarities, King says that he tries "not to make too much of it." King's 1987 novel, "Misery", is also of a writer who experiences severe injuries in an auto accident, but that novel focuses on the mental ill-health of a devoted fan who nurses the writer. After five operations in ten days and physical therapy, King resumed work on On Writing in July, though his hip was still shattered and he could only sit for about forty minutes before the pain became intolerable. His condition has since improved. King's lawyer and two others purchased Smith's van for $1,500, reportedly to avoid it appearing on eBay. Smith, a disabled construction worker, died in his sleep in September, 2000 at the age of 43. Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details about The Dark Tower follow. King incorporated his accident into the final novel of his Dark Tower series, in which the hero Roland Deschain and his friends try to stop King from being fatally injured by the van. In the story, Roland hypnotized both King and the driver in order to make them forget his appearance. The series premiere of Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital involved the main character, a painter out for a morning run being hit by a pick up truck, most likely inspired by this event as well.