Stephen King

Stephen King, the "King of Horror" is an American Author who has experimented with several Genres. Among them are: Suspense, Crime, Science-Fiction, Fantasy and Mystery. Stephen has written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in collections. His debut novel, Carrie, established him in horror. His collection of four Novella's, Different Seasons, was his first major departure from the Horror Genre. He has published under the Pen-name Richard Bachman and has co-written works with other authors.
Several of King's works have earned him notable awards, such as the Bram Stoker and August Derleth Awards. He has also won awards for his overall contributions to literature, including the 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2007 Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the 2014 National Medal of Arts. 
== Early Life ==
King was born in Portland, Maine on September 21st, 1947. His father, Donald Edwin King, a traveling vacuum salesman after returning from World War II, was born in Indiana with the surname Pollock, changing it to King as an adult. They lived with Donald's family in Chicago before moving to New York. King's parents returned to Maine towards the end of World War II, living in a modest house in Scarborough.
When King was two, his father left the family. His mother raised him and his older brother David by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. They moved from Scarborough and depended on relatives in Illinois, New York, Wisconsin, Indiana, Massacuhusetts, and Conneticut. When King was 11, his family moved back to Maine, now in Durham, where his mother cared for her parents until their deaths. After that, she became a caregiver in a local residential facility for the mentally challenged.
oks and then making up my own stories... Film was also a major influence. I loved the movies from the start. So when I started to write, I had a tendency to write in images because that was all I knew at the time." King was a voracious reader in his youth: "I read everything from Nancy Drew to Psycho. My favorite was The Shrinking Man, by Richard Matheson — I was 8 when I found that." King recalls his sudden realization of what he wanted to do for a living: while browsing through an attic with his elder brother, he discovered a box of their father's books: "The box I found that day was a treasure trove of old Avon paperbacks... The pick of the litter, however, was an H. P. Lovecraft collection from 1947 called The Lurking Fear and Other Stories... I was on my way. Lovecraft—courtesy of my father—opened the way for me."
King asked a bookmobile driver, "Do you have any stories about how kids really are?" She gave him Lord of the Flies. It proved formative: "It was, so far as I can remember, the first book with hands—strong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat. It said to me, 'This is not just entertainment; it's life or death.'... To me, Lord of the Flies has always represented what novels are for, why they are indispensable." He attended Durham Elementary School and entered Lisbon High School in Lisbon Falls, Maine, in 1962. He contributed to Dave's Rag, the newspaper his brother printed with a mimeograph machine, and later sold stories to his friends. His first independently published story was "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber", serialized over four issues of the fanzine Comics Review in 1965. He was a sports reporter for Lisbon's Weekly Enterprise.
In 1966, King entered the University of Maine at Orono on a scholarship. While there, he wrote for the student newspaper, The Maine Campus, and found mentors in the professors Edward Holmes and Burton Hatlen. King participated in a writing workshop organized by Hatlen, where he fell in love with Tabitha Spruce. King graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English, and his daughter Naomi Rachel was born that year. King and Spruce wed in 1971. King paid tribute to Hatlen: "Burt was the greatest English teacher I ever had. It was he who first showed me the way to the pool, which he called 'the language pool, the myth-pool, where we all go down to drink.' That was in 1968. I have trod the path that leads there often in the years since, and I can think of no better place to spend one's days; the water is still sweet, and the fish still swim."
== Career: ==
King sold his first professional short story, "The Glass Floor", to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967.
After graduating from the University of Maine, King earned a certificate to teach high school but was unable to find a teaching post immediately. He sold short stories to magazines like Cavalier. Many of these early stories were republished in Night Shift (1978). In 1971, King was hired as an English teacher at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. He continued to contribute short stories to magazines and worked on ideas for novels, including the anti-war novel Sword in the Darkness, still unpublished.
King published five short novels—Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man (1982) and Thinner (1984)—under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. He explains: "I did that because back in the early days of my career there was a feeling in the publishing business that one book a year was all the public would accept...eventually the public got wise to this because you can change your name but you can't really disguise your style." Bachman's surname is derived from the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive and his first name is a nod to Richard Stark, the pseudonym Donald E. Westlake used to publish his darker work. The Bachman books are grittier than King's usual fare; King called his alter-ego "Dark-toned, despairing...not a very nice guy." A Literary Guild member praised Thinner as "what Stephen King would write like if Stephen King could really write."
Bachman was exposed as King's pseudonym by Steve Brown, a Washington, D.C. bookstore clerk who noticed stylistic similarities between King and Bachman and located publisher's records at the Library of Congress that named King as the author of Rage. King announced Bachman's death from "cancer of the pseudonym". King reflected that "Richard Bachman began his career not as a delusion but as a sheltered place where I could publish a few early books which I felt readers might like. Then he began to grow and come alive, as the creatures of a writer's imagination so frequently do... He took on his own reality, that's all, and when his cover was blown, he died." In 1996, when Desperation was released, the companion novel The Regulators was published as a "discovered manuscript" by Bachman. In 2006, King announced that he had discovered another Bachman novel, Blaze, which was published the following year. The original manuscript had been held at the University of Maine for many years and had been covered by numerous King experts. King rewrote the original 1973 manuscript for its publication.
King has used other pseudonyms. In 1972, the short story "The Fifth Quarter" was published under the name John Swithen (a Carrie character) in Cavalier. Charlie the Choo-Choo: From the World of The Dark Tower was published in 2016 under the pseudonym Beryl Evans and illustrated by Ned Dameron. It is adapted from a fictional book central to the plot of King's The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands.
== King's Works: ==
King's Career has spanned over 5 decades, in which he has published 65 Novels/Novella's. 
* Carrie (1974)
* Salem's Lot (1975)
* The Shining (1977)
* Rage (1977)
* The Stand (1978)
* The Long Walk (1979)
* The Dead Zone (1979)
* Firestarter (1980)
* Roadwork (1981)
* Cujo (1981)
* The Running Man (1982)
* The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (1982)
* Christine (1983)
* Pet Sematary (1983)
* Cycle of the Werewolf (1983)
* The Tailsman (1984)
* The eyes of the Dragon (1984)
* Thinner (1984)
* It (1986)
* The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of The Three (1987)
* Misery (1987)
* The Tommy Knockers (1987)
* The Dark half (1988)
* The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition (1990)
* The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands (1991)
* Neediful Things (1991)
* Gerald's Game (1992)
* Delores Caliborne (1992)
* Insomnia (1994)
* Rose Madder (1995)
* The Green Mile (1996)
* Desperation (1996)
* The Regulators (1996)
* The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (1997)
* Bag of Bones (1998)
* The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999)
* Dreamcatcher (2001)
* Black House (2001)
* From a Buick 8 (2002)
* The Dark Tower V: Song of Susannah (2004)
* The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (2004)
* The Colorado Kid (2005)
* Cell (2006)
* Lacey's Story (2006)
* Blaze (2007)
* Duma Key (2008)
* Under the Dome (2009)
* 11/22/63 (2011)
* The Dark Tower: The Wind Through The Keyhole
* Joyland (2013)
* Doctor Sleep (2013)
* Mr. Mercedes (2014)
* Revival (2014)
* Finders Keepers (2015)
* End of Watch (2016)
* Gwendy's Button Box (2017)
* Sleeping Beauties (2017)
* The Outsider (2018)
* Elevation (2018)
* The Institute (2019)
* Later (2021)
* Billy Summers (2021)
* Gwendy's final task (2022)
* Fairy Tale (2022)
* Holly (2023)