As one of the most prolific and popular authors of the last half-century, Stephen King had
defined horror for a generation, but his rise to the top of the literary heap has been anything
but easy.
This is the tragic real-life story of Stephen King.
Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947, to Donald and Nellie
Ruth Pillsbury King.
According to Lisa Rogak's 2009 biography, Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen
King, baby Stephen's birth came as a surprise.
Years earlier, Ruth King was diagnosed as infertile, which had led the Kings to adopt
Stephen's older brother, David Victor, in 1945.
In the early years of their marriage, Ruth and Donald King were constantly on the move.
Donald, a merchant marine, was frequently away from home.
As Stephen King writes in his 1981 nonfiction book Danse Macabre, his father was a fan of
horror and science fiction stories and had himself unsuccessfully tried his hand at writing.
The discovery of a box of his father's books, which included a volume by horror writer H.P.
Lovecraft, would prove a revelatory moment for King.
When the author was only two years old, his father left to get a pack of cigarettes and
never returned.
Poor health kept young Stephen King home for most of what should have been his first year
in elementary school.
A case of measles and repeated bouts of strep which led to painful ear infections kept him
either in bed or in the doctor's office.
The treatments, which involved the repeated lancing of his eardrum, left King traumatized.
He wrote,
"The pain was beyond anything I have ever felt since — the only thing close was the
first month of recovery after being struck by a van in the summer of 1999."
When asked if there was an event in his childhood that in some way "warped" him into writing
horror stories, Stephen King says he can't remember any particular incident.
However, he has related one horrifying story that occurred when he was four.
In Danse Macabre, King wrote,
"According to Mom, I had gone off to play at a neighbor's house — a house that was
near a railroad line.
About an hour after I left, I came back, she said, as white as a ghost.
I would not speak for the rest of the day [...] It turned out that the kid I had been
playing with had been run over by a freight train while playing on or crossing the tracks
[...] My mom never knew if I had been near him when it happened."
Although Stephen King earned a partial scholarship to New Jersey's Drew University, his slim
finances kept him in his home state after high school.
Instead, he followed his older brother David to the University of Maine.
In college at the height of the Vietnam War, King was active in campus protests and wrote
a column for the campus newspaper called "King's Garbage Truck."
In his freshman year, he made his first professional sale to Startling Mystery Stories.
The short story, titled "The Glass Floor," earned the struggling student a windfall of
$35.
To supplement the weekly stipend of $5 his mother sent him, King took a job in the school's
library.
There, he met the woman who would become his wife, a history major and aspiring poet named
Tabitha Spruce.
In 2000, Tabitha told Biography,
"He really was literally the poorest college student I've ever met in my life.
[...] He was wearing [...] cut-off gum rubbers because he couldn't afford shoes."
In 1970, the couple had a child, a daughter named Naomi.
After graduation, King and Spruce married and moved to a trailer in Hermon, Maine.
While he unsuccessfully searched for a teaching position, King took on a succession of low-paying
jobs to make ends meet.
The struggling author pumped gas and worked in an industrial laundry.
Often depressed, King felt that all he had done with his education was replicate his
mother's life.
King wrote in On Writing that as a sickly 6-year-old, he spent the better part of a
year in bed.
To pass the time, King read everything he could get his hands on, from classics to comic
books.
While convalescing, he made his first tentative steps at composing his own tales.
King wrote,
"Imitation preceded creation; I would copy Combat Casey comics word for word [...] sometimes
adding my own descriptions..."
The budding author eventually worked up the courage to show one of his hybrid creations
to his mother.
Ruth King was impressed with her son's effort, but when asked if he made the story up on
his own, Stephen sheepishly admitted that he had copied it.
Admonishing him that he should write his own story — an even better story — Ruth King
set her son on the path to becoming an author.
Sadly, Nellie Ruth King would not see her son's rise to fame.
On December 18, 1973, just months before the publication of King's first novel, she lost
a long and torturous battle with cancer.
Stephen King's life would change forever in 1974 with the publication of Carrie.
The elements of Carrie, the story of an ostracized teen girl who wreaks bloody vengeance on her
high school tormentors with her newly discovered psychokinetic powers, came to King in bits
and pieces over a number of years before he finally sat down to write it.
A King details in On Writing, after furiously typing out three single-spaced pages, the
frustrated would-be author felt he just couldn't get a handle on the narrative.
Uncomfortable with writing from the perspective of Carrie's mostly female characters, King
gave up and tossed the manuscript in the trash.
"I threw Carrie away, my wife fished it out of the wastebasket and said, you oughta go
on."
Fortunately for King, his sharp-eyed wife retrieved the discarded manuscript, smoothed
the crumpled pages out, and read them.
Explaining that he was really onto something, Tabitha told him that she could help with
the teen girl perspective.
Carrie found a publisher in Doubleday, and King received a modest but much appreciated
advance of $2,500 that allowed the struggling family to buy a new car.
However, the best was yet to come.
On Mother's Day 1973, King found out that the paperback rights for his first novel had
sold for the astonishing sum of $400,000, of which he was guaranteed half.
Stephen King's days of financial instability were over.
He was now a professional novelist.
"My family is well provided for...If it were a matter of money, I would never have to put
my pen to paper or turn on my world processor again."
By the mid-1980s, Stephen King was a household name, a millionaire, and the undisputed master
of literary horror.
Although many of his works had been adapted for the screen, few had met with King's approval.
A Stephen King novel was money in the bank, but a film based on a Stephen King novel was
a consistently dodgy proposition.
King, a lifelong fan of cinema, finally got his chance to step behind the camera in 1986
thanks to Italian movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis.
According to Slash Film, King and De Laurentiis had hit it off during the production of the
film Cat's Eye, an anthology of three short stories.
De Laurentiis had given King the rare opportunity to adapt his own work for the screenplay and
recognized his talent as a visual storyteller.
When King expressed an interest in directing, De Laurentiis gave the bestselling author
a shot.
Unfortunately, King's directorial debut would prove disastrous.
Maximum Overdrive, based on King's short story "Trucks" about sentient machines taking over
the Earth, was a critical and box office failure and an ultimately frustrating experience for
the author, who was deep in the throes of cocaine addiction and alcoholism during the
film's production.
King told Tony Magistrale, author of Hollywood's Stephen King,
"The problem with that film is that I was coked out of my mind all through its production,
and I really didn't know what I was doing."
Nevertheless, Maximum Overdrive has since garnered a reputation as a cult classic.
In 1991, Stephen King experienced a real-life horror story so terrifying that it could have
been ripped from the pages of one of his books.
On the morning of Saturday, April 20, 1991, King's wife, Tabitha, discovered 26-year-old
Erik Keene of San Antonio, Texas, in their stately Victorian home in Bangor, Maine.
Keene was carrying a backpack which he claimed contained a bomb.
Mrs. King was alone in the house at the time and fled to a neighbor's home to call the
police.
When authorities arrived, they discovered Keene in the Kings' attic brandishing what
appeared to be a homemade detonator.
A police dog caused Keene to drop the device, which was discovered to be fake.
Keene later revealed to the press that he intended to exact revenge on King for allegedly
stealing the plot of his 1987 bestseller Misery from Keene's aunt.
After serving 127 days of a two-year suspended sentence, Keene was extradited back to Texas
for a parole violation.
King and his wife have dealt with a number of other unhinged fans and trespassers, including
a California man who asserted that the author was the real assassin of Beatle John Lennon,
and a Czech national who was arrested for stalking after leaving disturbing notes in
King's mailbox.
In On Writing, Stephen King writes that he took his first drink at age 18 on a high school
trip to New York and Washington D.C.
As is the case with most first-time drinkers, he overdid it and wound up violently ill.
Still, alcohol became a regular habit from that moment on.
He wrote,
"Alcoholics build defenses like the Dutch build dikes.
[...] I spent the first 12 years or so of my married life assuring myself that I 'just
liked to drink.'"
When Maine enacted a returnable bottle law in the early 1980s, seeing the sheer number
of empties in his recycling made King realize he had a problem.
Yet, he wouldn't be able to address it for several more years.
By 1985, King had added an addiction to cocaine to his drinking problem.
While on the drug, he would stay up late with his pulse racing dangerously as he wrote.
At last, King's wife staged an intervention.
Gathering friends and family, Tabitha King confronted the author with his substance abuse
and delivered an ultimatum: Get clean or get out.
Wisely, King chose rehab and has been clean and sober since the late 1980s.
On the afternoon of Saturday, June 19, 1999, Stephen King was taking his daily walk along
a secluded country road near his home in North Lovell, Maine.
While walking against traffic on Route 5, King was struck by a light blue minivan driven
by 43-year-old former construction worker Bryan Smith.
According to The Guardian, Smith had taken his eyes off the road while trying to get
control of one of his dogs that was rummaging through his beer cooler.
Hurled over the van, King struck his head on the windshield and landed in a ditch 14
feet away from the point of impact.
Smith assumed he had struck a deer until he noticed King's bloody glasses on his front
seat.
King suffered a concussion, a shattered hip and pelvis, broken ribs, a punctured lung,
and a fractured thigh bone.
Had he not quickly pivoted to the left as the van bore down him, he very well could
have been killed on impact.
Stephen King's 1977 novel Rage, written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, has a long
and unfortunate connection to school violence.
The story of a disturbed high school student who takes a classroom hostage at gunpoint,
Rage has been connected to incidents going back to at least 1988, and King decided to
have the book removed from circulation.
He told 60 Minutes,
"If there's anything that I regret in my career it's publishing the novel Rage."
In his 2013 essay "Guns," written in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings,
King elaborates that although he doesn't believe the novel is the sole cause of the incidents,
it may have acted as a, quote, "possible accelerant."
He wrote,
"I pulled it because in my judgment it might be hurting people, and that made it the responsible
thing to do."
Ironically, Rage has become a collector's item.
Since being pulled from print, first editions regularly sell for exorbitant sums.
Severely nearsighted since childhood, Stephen King has worn what he describes as, quote,
"Coke-bottle glasses" for most of his life.
However in a 1998 interview with CBS' 60 Minutes, King revealed a much more serious threat to
his eyesight than his lifelong myopia: macular degeneration
Related to aging, macular degeneration is the leading cause of vision loss and affects
more than ten million Americans.
The progressive condition causes a loss of vision in the center of the eye while leaving
peripheral vision largely unaffected.
King joked about it, saying,
"That's the part I want to keep as a man and as a writer is what I see out of the corners."
However, the writer has since revealed on his official website that, while he does have
a genetic predisposition to the condition he, as yet, isn't experiencing symptoms.
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