Stephen King

King's father walked out when Stephen was two, leaving his mother, Nellie, to raise two boys alone on whatever work she could find, and the family moved through a string of relatives' houses in four states before settling in Durham, Maine, when he was 11. He was writing by six or seven, copying comic panels and inventing his own captions, and sold his first story, to a magazine called Startling Mystery Stories, in 1967. At the University of Maine he met Tabitha Spruce in a writing workshop, and they married on January 2, 1971. He taught high school English at Hampden Academy for little money, and the family lived for a time in a trailer while he wrote at night at a child's desk wedged into the laundry room.

Tabitha found the first pages of Carrie in the wastebasket, thrown out because King doubted he could write convincingly about teenage girls, and told him to finish it. Doubleday bought the novel in 1973, and paperback rights sold for 400,000 dollars the following year, letting him quit teaching for good. What followed was one of the fastest publishing runs in American fiction: 'Salem's Lot, The Shining and The Stand within five years, then Cujo, Christine, Pet Sematary and It through the 1980s, several of them written, he later admitted, while drunk or high enough that he does not remember composing them. He has since published more than 65 novels and roughly 200 short stories, five of the novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, and sold well over 350 million books.

His wife staged an intervention after The Tommyknockers in 1987, confronting him with a garbage bag of beer cans, cocaine vials and cigarette butts pulled from his own office, and he got sober that year. Then, on June 19, 1999, a driver swerved onto the shoulder where King was walking near his Maine home and hit him directly, breaking his leg, hip and ribs in multiple places, and he needed five operations and months of recovery, and noted the dark irony of nearly being killed by something out of his own novel Misery. He kept writing anyway, in pain, partly through On Writing, the memoir he published the following year. The literary establishment took decades longer to come around: Harold Bloom called his 2003 National Book Foundation honor an alarming symptom of a dumbed-down culture.

King is still working. His two sons, Joe Hill and Owen King, both became published novelists in their own right, and King himself kept a new bestseller arriving nearly every year through the 2020s, including Holly in 2023 and You Like It Darker, which opened at number one on the New York Times list in 2024. Critics largely stopped arguing over whether he counted as literature, while film and television kept adapting him faster than he could publish, from The Shawshank Redemption to It. In 2024 he closed the two Bangor radio stations he had owned for decades, citing his age and years of financial losses — one of the few retreats in an otherwise undiminished output.

Stephen King's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Carrie book
  His debut novel, rescued from the trash by his wife 1974
• The Shining book 1977
• It book
  Won the August Derleth Award 1986
• Misery book
  Shared the inaugural Bram Stoker Award 1987
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft book
  Written while recovering from the 1999 accident 2000
• You Like It Darker book
  Debuted at number one on the New York Times list 2024

• 1967 aged ~20 Sells his first story, The Glass Floor
• 1970 aged ~23 Graduates from the University of Maine
• January 2, 1971 aged 23 Marries Tabitha Spruce
• 1974 aged ~27 Publishes Carrie
• 1985 aged ~38 Revealed as the author behind the Richard Bachman pseudonym
• 1987 aged ~40 Gets sober after his wife stages an intervention
• June 19, 1999 aged 51 Struck by a van while walking near his Maine home He needed five operations to recover.
• 2003 aged ~56 Receives the National Book Foundation medal, over some critics' objections
• 2024 aged ~77 You Like It Darker debuts at number one

• Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849
  Master of macabre fiction and poetry who invented the detective story and influenced horror worldwide. literary ancestor in American horror
• Ray Bradbury 1920–2012
  Science fiction writer whose Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles became American classics. genre predecessor
• Stanley Kubrick 1928–1999
  Director whose technically ambitious films redefined science fiction, war, horror, and cinematic authorship. adapted The Shining and clashed with him over it
• Joe Biden b. 1942
  46th president who enacted major infrastructure and climate legislation after decades in the Senate and vice presidency. called on him to step down in 2024