The canon of the horror novel: Stephen King’s works

Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author best known for his enormously popular horror novels. King was the 2003 recipient of The National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

King evidences 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 has also written stories outside the horror genre, including the novella collection Different Seasons, The Green Mile, The Eyes of the Dragon, and Hearts in Atlantis. In the past, Stephen King has written under the pen names Richard Bachman and (once) John Swithen.

When King was two years old, his father, Donald Edwin King, deserted his family. His mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury, 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.

As a child, King witnessed a gruesome accident - one of his friends was caught on a railroad and struck by a train. It has been suggested that this could have been the inspiration for King's dark, disturbing creations, though King himself dismisses the idea.

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. As a young boy, King was an avid reader of EC's horror comics, which provided the genesis for his love of horror.

His first published story was "In a Half-World of Terror" (retitled from "I Was a Teen-Age Grave-robber"), published in a horror fanzine issued by Mike Garrett of Birmingham, Alabama.

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 student newspaper, the Maine Campus. 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). Soon following its release, his mother died of uterine cancer. His Aunt Emrine read the novel to her before she died.

In the late 1970s-early 1980s, after becoming a popular horror writer, King published a handful of novels — Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Road Work (1981), The Running Man (1982), and Thinner (1984) — under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The idea behind this was largely an experiment to measure for himself whether or not he could replicate his own success again, and allay at least part of the notion inside his own head that popularity might all be just an accident of fate.

In On Writing, King admits that at this time he was consistently drunk and that he was an alcoholic for well over a decade. As King related in his memoir, he sought help and quit all forms of drugs and alcohol in the late 1980s, and has remained sober since.

King spends winter seasons in an oceanfront mansion located off the Gulf of Mexico in Sarasota, Florida. Their three children, Naomi Rachel, Joseph Hillstrom King (who appeared in the film Creepshow), and Owen Phillip, are grown and living on their own.

Stephen King is a lifelong fan of the Boston Red Sox, and is frequently found at both home and away baseball games.

Since becoming commercially successful, King and his wife, Tabitha, have donated considerable sums of money to various causes around their home state of Maine.

In 1999 King was injured in a car accident. In 2002, King announced he would stop writing, apparently motivated in part by frustration with his injuries, which had made sitting uncomfortable, and reduced his stamina. He has since written several books.

In King's nonfiction book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King discusses his writing style at great length and depth. King believes that, generally speaking, good stories cannot be called consciously and should not be plotted out beforehand, but are better served by focusing on a single "seed" of a story and letting the story grow itself from there. King often begins a story with no idea how the story will end. He mentions in the Dark Tower series that, halfway through its lengthy, nearly 30-year writing period, King received a letter from a woman with cancer who asked how the book would end, because she was unlikely to live long enough to read it. He stated that he didn't know. King believes strongly in this style, stating that his best writing comes from freewriting.

He is known for his great eye for detail, for continuity, and for inside references; many stories that may seem unrelated are often linked by secondary characters, fictional towns, or off-hand references to events in previous books. Read as a whole, King's work (which is centered around his Dark Tower series) creates a remarkable history that stretches from present day all the way back to the beginning of time (with a unique cosmogony).

King's books are filled with references to American history and American culture, particularly the darker, more fearful side of these. These references are generally spun into the stories of characters, often explaining their fears. Recurrent references include crime, war (especially the Vietnam War), violence, the supernatural, and racism.

King is also known for his folksy, informal narration, often referring to his fans as "Constant Readers" or "friends and neighbors." This familiar style contrasts with the horrific content of many of his stories.

King has a very simple formula for learning to write well: "Read four hours a day and write four hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can't expect to become a good writer."

King 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."

Shortly after his accident, King wrote the first draft of the book Dreamcatcher with a notebook and a Waterman fountain pen, which he called "the world's finest word processor."

Major works: The Dead Zone (1979); The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger (1982; revised edition, 2003); The Running Man (as Richard Bachman) (1982); Pet Sematary (1983); The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (1987); The Tommyknockers (1988); The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands (1991); Insomnia (1994); The Green Mile (1996); Desperation (1996); The Regulators (as Richard Bachman) (1996); The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (1997); Dreamcatcher (2001); The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla (2003); The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah (2004); The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (2004).

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