A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Date and Place of birth: |
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Life and Works: American writer, whose horror and fantasy tales enjoy tremendous popular success. Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine the 21th September, 1947. His father, a merchant seaman, deserted the family in 1950. The young Stephen and his brother David were raised in Durham, Maine, by their mother who worked in odd jobs to support her children. King wrote his first story at the age of 7 and sold his first piece of writing to a magazine when he was 18 years old He writes horror stories influenced by the 19th-century Gothic tradition, especially that of Edgar Allan Poe. His novels, short stories, screenplays, and essays have made him one of the best-selling authors in the world. King takes everyday situations and experiences and reveals their macabre and horrific potential. After graduating from the University of Maine in 1970, King continued to write while working a variety of laborer-type jobs, and getitbusng a job teaching English at Hampden academy. Marriage to his college sweetheart, Tabitha Spruce, and the birth of their first child occurred in 1971. And still he wrote. He made second tier short story sales to what are politely known as "men's magazines" (and impolitely known as "strokebooks") which, he fondly recalls, would provide money which would arrive just in time to pay for a doctor's visit or a new set of children's clothes. And he kept on writing, and amassing rejection slips for short stories and novels. In 1974 King's first novel, Carrie, was published. It is about a woman who exacts deadly revenge on her high school classmates by using her powers of telekinesis, the ability to move objects without touching them. Carrie had first only a moderate success and sold 13 000 copies in hardcover. However, Signet paid $400,000 for its paperback rights. After Carrie, things began changing for Stephen King. Salems's Lot, a tale of vampirism let loose in a small Maine town followed. Then The Shining, a masterpiece about a majestic --- and haunted --- resort hotel in Colorado. A mammoth book about world decimation by a plague inspired by evil called The Stand (1978) was also published. In the late 1970s King published his first paperbacks under the name of Richard Bachman. The Talisman (1984) was written with Peter Straub. King has also published non-fiction. In his collection of essays, Danse Macabre (1981), King described the writing process as a kind of "dance" in which the author searches out the private fears of each reader. Before the end of the decade, however, King found that he was becoming more than a well-known horror writer. Horror novels began to be described as "Stephen King-type books." Christine (1983) features a sinister car that seems to come alive, and It (1986) concerns a group of childhood friends who reunite to confront an evil presence in their hometown. King's many other novels include Misery (1987), Needful Things (1991), Dolores Claiborne (1992), Insomnia (1994), Rose Madder (1995), Bag of Bones (1998), where King returned to the theme of loss of a family member, and added into it the classical haunted house idea and familiar elements from his previous works: a small town where people know more than they tell, the collective guilty, and a hero who can't avoid confrontation with the evil powers; The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon (1999), and Dreamcatcher (2001). King moved into science fiction with The Dark Tower, a series of fantasies about Roland of Gilead. The series included The Gunslinger (1982), The Drawing of the Three (1987), The Waste Lands (1991), and Wizard and Glass (1997). His collections of short fiction include Night Shift (1978), Skeleton Crew (1985), and Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1994). Noted for their cinematic style, several of his novels and stories have been turned into successful motion pictures, including Carrie, The Shining, Misery , The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and some of them with screenplays by King, e.g., Pet Sematary. King confesses in On Writing (2000) that he had problems with alcohol as early as in 1975, when he wrote The Shining, and he also developed in the 1980s a drug addiction. In June 1999 King was seriously injured in a car accident but recovered and continued to write. King has also led the way in adopting innovative publishing techniques. In 1996 he published a six-part monthly serial entitled The Green Mile. By parceling the tale into monthly installments, available as paperback books, King sought to heighten the tension of the novel. His novella Riding the Bullet (2000) was released as an electronic entity, to be read on an e-book reader, personal digital assistant, or computer, and a subsequent serial novel, The Plant, was electronically self-published and released in installments at his website, stephenking.com, beginning in 2000, but the project was halted after six chapters. |
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