Stephen King

Stephen King was born the second son of Nellie Ruth Pillsbury and Donald Edwin King, a merchant seaman, in Portland, Maine, in 1947. His father left when he was just a toddler, and his mother raised King and his brother alone. They moved several times, including to Wisconsin and Indiana, before finally returning to Maine, where King’s mother worked as a caregiver, first for her parents, then at a home for the mentally ill. King attended Lisbon Falls High School in Lisbon Falls, Maine, where he began writing. He sold his first story in 1965 to an unofficial magazine and graduated from high school in 1966. He immediately enrolled at the University of Maine in Orono, Maine, where he met his future wife, Tabitha. In 1970, the same year King’s daughter was born, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English and later married Tabitha in 1971. He began work as a teacher at a public school and continued to write, publishing Carrie in 1973. The novel was wildly popular and cemented King as a major horror writer. The success of Carrie was followed by Salem’s Lot in 1975 and The Shining in 1977, which King wrote while briefly living in Boulder, Colorado. Over the years, King and his wife welcomed two sons, and King continued to write, under his own name and the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Since the 1970s, King has been a mainstay of contemporary horror and is the author of 61 novels, 200 short stories, and six nonfiction books. Several of his novels and short stories have been made into awarding-winning films, such as The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, Misery, and It. King is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades since the 1970s, most notably the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2003 and the National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2015. King lives with his wife, who is also a novelist, in Maine, where he is particularly appreciated for his philanthropic contributions to the community.