Stephen King

Stephen King, ca. 2013

**Stephen King** is the author of the original novel *The Stand* and creator of its world. He would be the one who would edit it down for publication and then restore most of his deletions and update the references for the Complete and Uncut Edition. He has been involved in one form or another in every adaptation of *The Stand* except the 2014 short film, which was an unauthorized fan film. As an actor, he played Teddy Weizak, a minor character resident of the Boulder Free Zone in the 1994 TV miniseries.

As of December 2020, he has also authored or co-authored all of the spin-offs and built the "Stephen King multiverse."

## Biography (Before *The Stand*)

King was born September 21, 1947 in Portland, Maine, the second son of merchant seaman Donald Edwin King (née Pollock) and his wife Nellie Ruth King (née Pillsbury). Before marriage, Donald had changed his last name to King. When Stephen was two years old, Donald abandoned them, leaving Nellie - a health care worker - to raise their two sons, Stephen and his elder brother David, on her own.

As a child, King and his mother and brother moved around in New England, the northeast and the Upper Midwest - including Fort Wayne, Indiana. He was raised devoutly Methodist, but lost the faith, although he would later refuse to identify as an atheist.

Frequent themes of King's adult work include absentee fathers and single mothers. Indeed, all three of the main male protagonists - Stuart Redman, Larry Underwood and Nick Andros - are sons of single mothers, as is the villainous Trashcan Man. King's upbringing would also inspire his recurring themes of Protestant Christianity, 1950s childhoods, the Baby Boomer Generation, the paranoia of the Cold War, loss of innocence and the psychological horror of isolation, all of which are present in *The Stand*, as are the locations of Maine (Fran's home) and Indiana (Trashcan Man's).

As a teenager, his family returned to Maine, where he graduated Lisbon Falls High School. He went on to the University of Maine and received a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1970. The year he graduated, his girlfriend Tabitha Spruce gave birth to a daughter, Naomi Rachel King. On January 7, 1971, Stephen and Tabitha were married, and they would have two more children - Joseph Hillström "Joe Hill" (born June 4, 1972) and Owen Phillip (born February 21, 1977). Joe and Owen would both become novelists, and Tabitha is also an accomplished novelist.

Although he had always been fascinated by the SF/fantasy/horror genre, King had struggled as a writer from the time he sold his first published short story, "The Glass Floor," to the fanzine *Startling Mystery Stories* in 1967. He had written three unpublished novels before Doubleday agreed to publish *Carrie*, a novel about a troubled teenaged girl whose telekinesis allows her to exact revenge on her bullying classmates, in the spring of 1973. With the $2500-dollar advance, he bought a Ford Pinto. A month after the hardback rights, the New American Library paid him $200,000 for the paperback rights to the still-unpublished novel. At this time, he began a drugs and alcohol problem which would continue until the late 1980s, when he became clean and sober. With *Carrie* still waiting to be published, days after Christmas that year, Nellie would die of uterine cancer.

Thus, Larry Underwood's backstory as a struggling musician on the brink of success and with a developing drug habit when he is forced to watch his healthcare worker mother die is semi-autobiographical.

Shortly after Nellie's death, King moved with Tabitha, Naomi and Joe to Boulder, Colorado, which would become an important setting for *The Stand*. In the meanwhile, he published his second novel, '*Salem's Lot*, about a Maine town overrun by vampires. In 1976, *Carrie* was adapted into a hit film by critically acclaimed director Brian DePalma. The film was nominated for two Oscars: Best Actress for Sissy Spacek as the titular teen, and Best Supporting Actress for Piper Laurie as her overbearing, emotionally abusive single mother. In Colorado, King wrote his third novel, set in that state, *The Shining*, about an alcoholic father who is a winter caretaker for a hotel but is driven mad by the ghosts which haunt it. It was in Colorado that King began the novel which would become *The Stand*.

It was also in Colorado where King began his experiment of writing under a pen name, Richard Bachman. His first such novel, *Rage*, bears no relation to the 1972 film of the same name. The Bachman novel is about a high school kid who brings a gun to school, shoots his teacher and takes his classmates hostage. (Nearly 30 years later, King would pull this novel from publication after the Columbine High School massacre.) The 1972 film, directed by and starring George C. Scott, is loosely based on the Dugway sheep incident, which was a major influence on *The Stand*.

By late 1976, King and his family returned to western Maine, where Owen was born, and where King completed *The Stand* and submitted it for publication. As he was still hardly a household name, the accountants at Doubleday informed him the most they could charge for one of his books was $12.95, and he would have to cut nearly 400 pages to meet that price mark. King himself personally chose which material to excise, and the novel was released on October 3, 1978.

It was estimated to have been King's best selling work to date, and brought him an entirely new fanbase beyond the die-hard horror fans who had followed his earliest work. Exact sales figures are unknown, because it was released in the middle of a newspaper strike, and so *The New York Times* Fiction Best Seller List was not being published. However, for the next 12 years, as he grew immensely in popularity, King would say the work of his for which he got the most questions was *The Stand*.

## Biography (After *The Stand*)

Whether due to the success of the novel *The Stand* or the film *Carrie*, beginning in 1979, Stephen King ceased to be simply a horror writer with a modest cult and became a brand name - the "Master of Horror," as he was called. His fifth novel, *The Dead Zone*, about a psychic who must stop a madman elected President of the United States from starting World War III, introduced the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine, where many of his future stories would take place. What followed were a string of successes and #1 *New York Times* Best Sellers: *Firestarter* about a young girl with pyrokinesis in 1980; *Cujo* about a rabid St. Bernard in Castle Rock in 1981; *Pet Sematary* about a burial ground for companion animals who come back as zombies in 1983.

Nor was it limited to horror, nor to his novels. His 1982 anthology *Different Seasons* features none of what might be called the SF/Fantasy/Horror genre, and yet it hit the top of the charts. Its first story, "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption," is about a wrongly convicted prisoner who dreams of escape and would become the 1994 classic Best Picture nominee *The Shawshank Redemption*; its second, "Apt Pupil," about a teenage boy who befriends and becomes enchanted by a hiding Nazi war criminal, a 1998 film directed by Bryan Singer fresh off the success of his breakthrough *The Usual Suspects*; its third, "The Body," about four 12-year-olds who go looking for a classmate who has been killed by a train - based on real events from King's childhood - the 1986 Oscar-nominated film *Stand by Me*, directed by Rob Reiner, who would later direct the 1990 film *Misery*, based on a 1987 King novel of the same name, about an author of a popular pulp series held captive by an obsessive fan, for which Kathy Bates won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as the fan Annie Wilkes. (Reiner would also name his production company "Castle Rock Productions"). King also hit #1 in 1985 for *Skeleton Crew*, a short story collection.

There were also the highly successful film adaptations. In addition to the ones listed above, in 1980, director Stanley Kubrick released his adaptation of *The Shining* starring Jack Nicholson. The adaptations of *The Dead Zone* and *Cujo* - both in 1983 - and *Firestarter* in 1984 were also box office hits.

Indeed, King's name pulled so much weight, he didn't need to have written it himself, nor *as* himself. His novel *The Talisman* - which bears multiple resemblances to *The Stand* and its spinoff *The Dark Tower*, cowritten with his friend Peter Straub, sat atop *The New York Times* list for 12 straight weeks in 1984 and '85, and later in '85, when it was revealed he was, in fact, "Richard Bachman," his fifth novel under that pseudonym, *Thinner*, about an overweight loutish salesman who receives a Gypsy curse that makes him waste away, put Bachman on top for the first time and for four straight weeks.

He had even made a brief foray into directing with the 1986 film *Maximum Overdrive*, loosely based on his short story "Trucks," about tractor-trailer trucks becoming sentient and murderous. This film was neither the box office nor critical success of some of his other efforts, however, and was nominated for two Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Director. Although it received a small cult following and was nominated for Best Film at the International Film Fantasy Awards, it can certainly *not* be called as classic as another feature-length directorial debut of a Baby Boomer "Steve" about killer semis, the 1971 TV film *Duel* by Steven Spielberg.

The failure of *Maximum Overdrive* notwithstanding, with his superstardom, King, who was now being published by Viking Press, was no longer told by the accountants how long his novels could be. His 1986 effort *It*, about a group of teenage friends who discover an ancient evil in their small Maine town in the form of an evil clown and come together 25 years later to defeat it, had clocked in at over 1100 pages, only slightly shorter than the first draft of *The Stand*, and yet it dominated the best seller lists in the autumn of 1986 and winter of '87.

As he was getting clean, King realized he finally had the clout to present his full vision of what was still his most beloved and admired masterpiece. When he approached Doubleday with the idea, they readily agreed, and so he restored most of the 400 pages, although some he realized were best left on the cutting room floor. He also updated references and reset the novel in 1990, and he tapped his friend Bernie Wrightson - a comic book artist with whom he had collaborated on the 1982 film *Creepshow*, an homage to the 1950s EC horror comics which inspired both King and Wrightson - to draw 12 original illustrations for the new version.

This Complete and Uncut Edition was the #1 *New York Times* Fiction Best Seller from May 6 to June 9, 1990, punctuated only by the return of British romance author Rosamunde Pilcher's novel *September* for the week of May 21-27. It was the second of three appearances at #1 King made in 1990, after he topped it in the first two weeks for his 1989 novel *The Dark Half*, inspired by his experiences as Richard Bachman, about a novelist whose pseudonym becomes a separate, malicious entity, but before he returned to the top in autumn with his four-novella anthology *Four Past Midnight*.

Throughout the '90s, his nearly unprecedented success as an author allowed him an equally nearly unprecedented degree of creative control over adaptations of his work. Beginning with the 1991 TV miniseries *Golden Years*, an original teleplay written by King about an elderly man who starts to age in reverse, King would more often serve as executive producer on the film and television projects based on his work. After he was the protagonist of an entire segment in the film *Creepshow* - as a farmer who finds an alien meteor that turns him into a walking pile of moss - he would also frequently act in these works, also, if only as a cameo.

This was therefore true of the 1994 TV miniseries adaptation of *The Stand*. King himself wrote all the teleplays, served as executive producer and acted in the minor role of Teddy Weizak.

On June 19, 1999, while walking along the road, King was hit by a distracted truck driver named Bryan Edwin Smith. Among his numerous physical injuries was a concussion, which - perhaps exacerbated by brain damage from his previous drug and alcohol abuse - made concentration on epics such as *The Stand* or *It* difficult. Shortly after his accident, King stated once he finished the novels he had in progress and *The Dark Tower*, they would be his last novels. Although most of his early 2000s work *was* much shorter, thankfully for his fans, this vow proved to be short-lived. In 2009, he published *Under the Dome*, an epic about a Maine town cut off from the rest of the world by a strange, impenetrable dome, which was followed in 2011 by the 850-page novel *11/22/63* about a time traveler who attempts to avert the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

King continues to write fiction, nonfiction, screenplays and digital media, now occasionally in collaboration with his son Owen. He also maintains a great deal of control over adaptations of his work. Along with his wife Tabitha, he owns three radio stations in the Bangor, Maine area: WZON (AM oldies), WKIT (FM rock) and WZLO (FM album alternative). He is also active in philanthropy and Democratic Party politics and was an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, whom he compared to Greg Stillson, the antagonist of his 1979 novel *The Dead Zone*. In addition to numerous other awards, in 2003, the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2015, he received the National Medal of Arts for his contributions to literature.

He lives with Tabitha in their house in Bangor (which is set to become a writer's retreat), another one in Lovell, and a summer home in Sarasota, Florida.