He's one of the most popular writers of the last few decades.
He has sold more than 350 million books, published more than 60 novels, many of them taken to
the cinema, even directed a film.
And his name is the best synonym for terror.
Of course, we're talking about the legendary Stephen King.
Although his childhood was not a scary tale, the difficulties he went through did inspire
his work.
Many of them are set in Maine, in the northeastern United States, where he was born on September
21, 1941.
At that time it was one of the poorest areas of the country.
His father Donald King was a modest vacuum cleaner salesman, who also left the family
when Stephen was only two years old.
His mother Ruth Pillsbury had to take care of him and his adopted older brother David.
She often had to combine two or three jobs to support the family, and leave her children
home alone because she couldn't afford a babysitter.
David and Stephen spent hours reading horror stories and comics.
That's probably where their obsession was born, and among their favorites were the stories
from "Tales from the Crypt" and "Dracula" by Bram Stoker.
After several years of moving, the family finally settled in Portland when Stephen was
eleven.
There he lived through one of the most traumatic events of his life.
While they were playing, he witnessed one of his friends get caught on tracks and killed
by the train.
But he always says he doesn't remember anything about it.
As a teenager he always bragged to everyone that he was not afraid of anything.
He kept reading all the scary books that fell into his hands, and when he had some money
he always went to the movies to watch horror and science fiction B movies.
At the age of thirteen, digging through his attic, he made a life-changing discovery.
When he found some manuscripts of his father he found out that he had tried to become a
writer, but nothing was ever published.
Stephen set out to achieve what his father had failed to achieve.
And after many rejections, at the age of 18, he managed to publish his first story, "I
Was a Teenage Grave Robber".
He told the story of a boy who stole corpses for a mad scientist, and was inspired by his
own experience, occasionally working as an undertaker at the local cemetery.
He also had other jobs as a janitor or laundry clerk, necessary to be able to pay for his
studies.
But he eventually managed to attend the University of Maine where he studied English-language
arts.
It was in the faculty library that he met his wife, Tabitha Spruce, also a writer.
They had their first daughter Naomi Rachel in 1970 and married the following year, as
soon as she was able to graduate.
They moved in to live in a small trailer, and although she continued to publish short
stories in adult magazines, she had to take a job at an English academy to support her
family.
In his few spare time, he locked himself in the solitude of the boiler room of his house
to write.
In between, his second son, Joe Hill, was born, and although Stephen continued to send
manuscripts of new novels, none of them were ever published, and he began to get desperate.
One day Tabitha retrieved a manuscript he had scrapped from the house dumpster.
It was called "Carrie" and told the story of a marginalized teenager, pressured by a
controlling mother, who developed psychic powers and retaliated.
Stephen thought he didn't know how to portray teenage characters, but his wife convinced
him to rewrite it and send it to the publisher.
The result was his first big sales success, which not only allowed him to get out of modest
life and dedicate himself completely to writing, but it was taken to the cinema a few years
later by Brian De Palma, also with great success.
His next work was "Salem's Lot", the story of a vampire who lives in a small village
in Maine.
And shortly afterwards he had his third son, Owen.
After this, Stephen felt that he and his family needed a vacation, so they went to spend some
time in a big hotel in the mountains, which at that time of the year was deserted.
Wandering through the empty corridors he came up with his new novel, "The Shining", where
a child with psychic powers is threatened by the spirits that inhabit a hotel and turn
his alcoholic father against him and his own mother.
In addition to becoming a bestseller was taken to the cinema by the great director Stanley
Kubrick, although Stephen wasn't happy with the result.
Meanwhile he continued with his frantic writing pace and soon had a new novel ready, "Rage".
However, publishers didn't allow their writers to publish more than one novel a year, to
maintain their prestige.
The solution for Stephen was to create a pseudonym, Richard Bachman, under which he published
this and six other novels.
He even went so far as to put himself behind the camera to direct "Maximum Overdrive" in
1986, although it had little success.
But the 1980s was also a difficult time for Stephen, as he had to deal with his addiction
to alcohol and other drugs, which he managed to overcome with the help of his family and
friends.
And he continued to publish best-sellers, such as "Pet Sematary" where he translated
his children's tradition of burying dead animals in front of his house into the story of a
father resurrecting his recently deceased son.
Others were also taken to the movies, such as "It", the terrifying clown's tale based
on an anecdote from his childhood in Maine.
Or "Misery", the story of a writer kidnapped by a fan, which reflected his fear of the
harassers who began to persecute him when he became famous.
Another of the events that marked his life was the accident he suffered in 1999, when
a car hit him while walking on the road, and for which he had to undergo several operations
and a long period of rest and rehabilitation.
However, he managed to continue with his work, and of course he turned the experience into
a new novel, "From a Buick 8", the story of a killer vehicle with a life of its own.
He has since continued his prolific career, publishing one or two novels per year, and
receiving a multitude of awards, with which we could fill another video.
We can mention among others "The Dead Zone", "Cujo", "The Green Mile", "Dreamcatcher" or
"The Shawshank Redemption", all of them translated to cinema.
One of his latest adaptations has been for the small screen, with the TV series "Mr Mercedes",
a psychological thriller about a former detective obsessed with an unsolved murder case.
The next one will be the film Doctor Sleep, the second part of The Shinning, which will
soon be released in cinemas and will surely make us feel very scared.
Do you dare to enter his horror world?