The King

"Do I like to scare people? Yeah, I do. Do I like the idea I'm referred to as a horror novelist? No, I don't." Stephen King said at the beginning of the BBC documentary, Shining in the Dark in 1999.

Over the past 25 years, Stephen King has become a popular being within the film industry, since almost all of his books have been turned into either movies or television. He started getting popular back in the seventies with his classics such as Carrie and The Shining.

With most of King's work, other than a mystery or suspense, his stories are about deep emotional trauma, and most are set in a familiar world. In Stephen King's stories he grounds everything in the real world, you can read about people drinking Coke and eating at McDonalds. This aided his popularity, since most television programs and films used fake names to cover up brand names.

General Career and Life

Maine is the setting for almost all of King's novels. Maine is a beautiful state on the surface, with pleasant people and a nice society, but King has possibly turned it into the most frightening state in the Union.

Stephen King has spent most of his life in Maine; he was brought up by his mother in the puny town of Durham. The town is so small it doesn't have a main street. Stephen's father disappeared when he was two.

After his father left, his mother was left to raise King and his siblings alone. Soon they moved around, from place-to-place, possibly trying to look for their father. Stephen's mother died of cancer.

"Toward the end she had all this medication, she had all this dope and she was stoned most of the time." Stephen explains his visit with his mother. "And, when I was visiting her near the end she said, 'You know, Stephen, for a while before World War II, your father was a vacuum cleaner salesman,'" Stephen went on to explain how his mother chuckled dreamily. "She said, 'Your father was the only salesman who could sell vacuum cleaners to widows at two o'clock in the morning.'"

In Stephen's novel The Body, he featured a scene from his own past, as a child he lived by a stream, and although they would fish in the water, no one went swimming.

"This friend of mine, David Hannah, decided to do a hand-stand." Stephen explained in his documentary with BBC. "His feet came up out of the water and he was covered with leeches."

Stephen says that it was no big plan to write about his past, although in many of his novels and novellas he features different happenings of his childhood. In Stephen's childhood house, he had written two books that were eventually published, one was called Rage, which has since been withdrawn from publication.

A good sum of King’s books were centered on teenage violence. His fascination with teenage violence started when he was a young boy, and kept a rather odd scrap book. It featured 50's American notorious serial killer, Charlie Starkweather, whom went of a killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming with his fourteen year old girlfriend. Together they had slain eleven people.

King says he kept the book to know what to look for and what to avoid, so he could notice signs in people, and know to stay away from them, and he also thought of it as a starting line for his writing.

School Life

In school, Stephen was bullied and joked about. He wasn't a sophisticated teenager; he wore his slippers to school out of not having any other things to wear, and was often considered strange to his peers.

In the BBC documentary Shining in the Dark one of Stephen's old teachers explains how he enjoyed reading horror classics and comic books, which some think to be a fuse to his writing career. King's desire to be an author lead him to the University of Maine, where he studied English. Though they couldn't teach him about becoming a novelist.

One of Stephen's college professors thinks that the college wouldn't have had anything to teach him anyway, his professor thinks he knew how to write stories and create characters without being taught to.

At the University of Maine Stephen met and married his wife Tabitha, where they soon had a baby and found it difficult to make money.

The Beginning

During college, while King was driving a laundry truck and his wife was working nights at a doughnut shop, where King's first published novel Carrie was written. But it was a book that almost never got out to public.

After King finished the novel, he tossed the manuscript in the trash and decided to move on, but Tabitha dug it out and read it.

After a couple minutes of Tabitha trying to persuade Stephen to publish Carrie, King caved and ended up agreeing with his wife.

Carrie was about a high school girl who used her supernatural powers to take revenge on her tormentors. In his BBC documentary, King explains how the main character, Carrie, was based off two girls he knew in school. But both of the women are dead, neither one made it to the age of thirty.

After Carrie was published it earned King a $200,000 advance. This gave him enough money to become a full-time author. He continued to write about the little threatening things of everyday life.

The Middle

Stephen explains in his BBC documentary how he got the basis of The Shining from an incident with his own son, Joe. The Shining is about a father who wants to kill his child and wife, the man was a recovering alcoholic and suffering from a mental illness brought on by living, trapped, in a hotel for a month.

After The Shining, a group of bestselling novels followed at the rate of two a year, and King quickly became the highest paid author in the world and in King's fame, he turned it into the book Misery. Misery is a story about romance author Paul Sheldon, who is rescued by Annie Wilks (played by Kathy Bates) from a car wreck.

After Misery, King had an experience with terror, when a demented fan broke into his home with a shoe box.

The man told King's wife, Tabitha, that inside the box was a bomb, and that he was going to blow Stephen up for stealing his ideas for novels. After the man was caught, they found that the 'bomb' was actually paperclips and erasers wired together.

Now

The price of King's fame hasn't been so high that he has been forced out of Maine. He still resides in the state he grew up in, playing in his town's softball game every week. Stephen says he stays in Maine because he knows everyone, and as a friend, everyone knows him.

Although on the surface King may seem as if he has the perfect life, but on the inside he is struggling with some powerful personal demons.

Stephen is currently a recovering alcoholic, and with his book Dolores Claiborne he was able to seal in the life of an alcoholic.

"I wasn't a mean drunk," Stephen compared himself to a character in his story. "I was a nice drunk, you would have liked me."

Also, King is suffering from molecular degeneration, which is the thinning of the retinas. It is not currently in an active but it could become active at any time, inevitably making him go blind. Currently, Stephen is making an estimated $40,000,000 a year, and he is father to Naomi King, Joe King, and Otis King, and husband to Tabitha King. He resides in Portland, Maine, and is 64-years-old.