Stephen King

**Birthplace** | Portland, Maine, United States

**Stephen King** wrote the novel upon which the miniseries *11.22.63* is based. He was one of the executive producers on the miniseries.

## Biography

Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, at the Maine General Hospital in Portland. His father was born under the surname "Pollock", but used the last name "King", under which Stephen was born. He has an older brother, David. When his father abandoned the family, his mother, Ruth, took over raising the family with help from relatives. They traveled throughout many states over several years, finally moving back to Durham, Maine, in 1958.

Stephen began his actual writing career in January of 1959, when David and Stephen decided to publish their own local newspaper named "Dave's Rag". Stephen attended Lisbon High School, in Lisbon, in 1962. Collaborating with his best friend, Chris Chesley, in 1963, they published a collection of eighteen short stories called "People, Places, and Things--Volume I". King's stories included "Hotel at the End of the Road", "I've Got to Get Away!", "The Dimension Warp", "The Thing at the Bottom of the Well", "The Stranger", "I'm Falling", "The Cursed Expedition", and "The Other Side of the Fog." A year later, King's amateur press, Triad and Gaslight Books, published a two-part book titled "The Star Invaders".

King made his first actual published appearance in 1965 in the magazine Comics Review with his story "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber". The story ran about six-thousand words in length. In 1966 he graduated from high school and took a scholarship to attend the University of Maine. Looking back on his high school days, King recalled that "my high school career was totally undistinguished. I was not at the top of my class, nor at the bottom." Later that summer, King began working on a novel called "Getting It On", about some kids who take over a classroom and try unsuccessfully to ward off the National Guard. During his first year at college, King completed his first full-length novel, "The Long Walk". He submitted the novel to Bennett Cerf at Random House only to have it rejected. King took the rejection badly and filed the book away.

He made his first small sale of $35 with the story "The Glass Floor". In June 1970 King graduated from the University of Maine with a Bachelor of Science degree in English and a certificate to teach high school. King's next idea came from the poem by Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came". He found bright colored green paper in the library and began work on "The Dark Tower" saga, but his chronic shortage of money meant that he was unable to further pursue the novel, and it, too, was filed away. King took a job at a filling station pumping gas for $1.25 an hour. Soon he began to earn money for his writings by submitting his short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier.

On January 2, 1971, he married Tabitha King (née Tabitha Jane Spruce). In the fall of 1971, King took a teaching job at Hampden Academy, earning $6,400 a year. The Kings moved to Hermon, a town west of Bangor. Stephen then began work on a short story about a teenage girl named Carietta White. After completing a few pages, he decided it was not a worthy story and crumpled the pages up and tossed them into the trash. Fortunately, Tabitha took the pages out and read them. She encouraged her husband to continue the story, which he did. In January 1973, he submitted "Carrie" to Doubleday. In March, Doubleday bought the book. On May 12 the publisher sold the paperback rights for the novel to New American Library for $400,000. His contract called for getting half of that sum, and he quit his teaching job to pursue writing full time.

Since then, King has had numerous short stories and novels published and movies made from his work. He has been called the "Master of Horror". His books have been translated into thirty-three different languages, published in over thirty-five different countries. There are over three-hundred million copies of his novels in publication. He continues to live in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, and writes out of his home.

## References

1. ↑ Stephen King on the Internet Movie Database. Retrieved on September 20, 2019, edited.