His debut, Carrie (1974), established him in horror, and Different Seasons (1982), a collection of four novellas, was his first major departure from the genre. Among the films adapted from King's fiction are Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), The Dead Zone (1983), Stand by Me (1986), Misery (1990), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Dolores Claiborne (1995), The Green Mile (1999), It (2017), The Life of Chuck (2024) and The Long Walk (2025).
He has published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman and has co-written works with other authors, notably his friend Peter Straub and sons Joe Hill and Owen King. He has also written nonfiction, notably Danse Macabre (1981) and On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000).
Among other awards, King has won the O. Henry Award for "The Man in the Black Suit" (1994) and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller for 11/22/63 (2011). He has also won honors for his overall contributions to literature, including the 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2007 Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the 2014 National Medal of Arts.
Joyce Carol Oates called King "a brilliantly rooted, psychologically 'realistic' writer for whom the American scene has been a continuous source of inspiration, and American popular culture a vast cornucopia of possibilities."
Early life and education
King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. His father, Donald Edwin King, a traveling vacuum salesman after returning from World War II, was born in Indiana with the surname Pollock, changing it to King as an adult. King's mother was Nellie Ruth King (nรฉe Pillsbury). His parents were married in Scarborough, Maine, on July 23, 1939.
They lived with Donald's family in Chicago before moving to Croton-on-Hudson, New York. King's parents returned to Maine towards the end of World War II, living in a modest house in Scarborough. He is of Scots-Irish descent.
When King was two, his father left the family. His mother raised him and his older brother David by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. They moved from Scarborough and depended on relatives in Chicago, Illinois; Croton-on-Hudson; West De Pere, Wisconsin; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Malden, Massachusetts; and Stratford, Connecticut.
When King was 11, his family moved to Durham, Maine, where his mother cared for her parents until their deaths. After that, she became a caregiver in a local residential facility for the mentally challenged.
King says he started writing when he was "about six or seven, just copying panels out of comic books and then making up my own stories ... Film was also a major influence. I loved the movies from the start. So when I started to write, I had a tendency to write in images because that was all I knew at the time." Regarding his interest in horror, he says "Itโs built in.
Thatโs all. The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi. When that little deer gets caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also exhilarated." He recalls showing his mother a story he copied out of a comic book. She responded: "I bet you could do better. Write one of your own." He recalls "an immense feeling of possibility at the idea, as if I had been ushered into a vast building filled with closed doors and had been given the key to open any I liked." King was a voracious reader in his youth: "I read everything from Nancy Drew to Psycho. My favorite was The Shrinking Man, by Richard MathesonโI was 8 when I found that."
King asked a bookmobile driver, "Do you have any stories about how kids really are?" She gave him a copy of Lord of the Flies, which proved formative: "It was, so far as I can remember, the first book with handsโstrong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat. It said to me, 'This is not just entertainment; it's life or death.'...
To me, Lord of the Flies has always represented what novels are for, why they are indispensable." He attended Durham Elementary School and entered Lisbon High School in Lisbon Falls, Maine, in 1962. He contributed to Dave's Rag, the newspaper his brother printed with a mimeograph machine, and later sold stories to his friends.
His first independently published story was "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber", serialized over four issues of the fanzine Comics Review in 1965. He was a sports reporter for Lisbon's Weekly Enterprise.
In 1966, King entered the University of Maine at Orono on a scholarship. While there, he wrote for the student newspaper, The Maine Campus, and found mentors in the professors Edward Holmes and Burton Hatlen. King participated in a writing workshop organized by Hatlen, where he fell in love with Tabitha Spruce.
King graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English, and his daughter Naomi Rachel was born that year. King and Spruce wed in 1971. He paid tribute to Hatlen: "Burt was the greatest English teacher I ever had. It was he who first showed me the way to the pool, which he called 'the language pool, the myth-pool, where we all go down to drink.' That was in 1968.
I have trod the path that leads there often in the years since, and I can think of no better place to spend one's days; the water is still sweet, and the fish still swim."
Career
Beginnings
King sold his first professional short story, "The Glass Floor", to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. After graduating from the University of Maine, King earned a certificate to teach high school but was unable to find a teaching post immediately. He sold short stories to magazines like Cavalier. Many of these early stories were republished in Night Shift (1978).
In 1971, King was hired as an English teacher at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. He continued to contribute short stories to magazines and worked on ideas for novels, including the anti-war novel Sword in the Darkness, still unpublished.
1970s: Carrie to The Dead Zone
King recalls the origin of his debut, Carrie: "Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together." It began as a short story intended for Cavalier; King tossed the first three pages in the trash but his wife, Tabitha, recovered them, saying she wanted to know what happened next. She told him: "You've got something here.
I really think you do." He followed her advice and expanded it into a novel. Per The Guardian, Carrie "is the story of Carrie White, a high-school student with latentโand then, as the novel progresses, developingโtelekinetic powers. It's brutal in places, affecting in others (Carrie's relationship with her almost hysterically religious mother being a particularly damaged one), and gory in even more." The New York Times noted that "King does more than tell a story.
He is a schoolteacher himself, and he gets into Carrie's mind as well as into the minds of her classmates. He also knows a thing or two about symbolism โ blood symbolism especially."
King was teaching Dracula to high school students and wondered what would happen if Old World vampires came to a small New England town. This was the germ of 'Salem's Lot, which King called "Peyton Place meets Dracula". King's mother died from uterine cancer around the time 'Salem's Lot was published.
After his mother's death, King and his family moved to Boulder, Colorado. He paid a visit to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park which provided the basis for The Shining, about an alcoholic writer and his family taking care of a hotel for the winter. It was around this time that King suspected he was an alcoholic.
King's family returned to Auburn, Maine in 1975, where he completed The Stand, an apocalyptic novel about a pandemic and its aftermath. King recalls that it was the novel that took him the longest to write, and that it was "also the one my longtime readers still seem to like the best". In 1977, the Kings, with the addition of Owen Philip, their third and youngest child, traveled briefly to England.
They returned to Maine that fall, and King began teaching creative writing at the University of Maine. The courses he taught on horror provided the basis for his first nonfiction book, Danse Macabre. In 1979, he published The Dead Zone, about an ordinary man gifted with second sight. It was the first of his novels to take place in Castle Rock, Maine. King later reflected that with The Dead Zone, "I really hit my stride."
1980s: Different Seasons to The Dark Half
In 1982, King published Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas with a more serious dramatic bent than the horror fiction for which he had become famous. Three of the four novellas were adapted as films: The Body as Stand by Me (1986); Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption as The Shawshank Redemption (1994); and Apt Pupil as the film of the same name (1998).
The fourth, The Breathing Method, won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. Alan Cheuse wrote "Each of the first three novellas has its hypnotic moments, and the last one is a horrifying little gem."
King struggled with addiction throughout the decade and often wrote under the influence; he says he "barely remembers writing" Cujo (1981). In 1983, he published Christine, "A love triangle involving 17-year-old misfit Arnie Cunningham, his new girlfriend and a haunted 1958 Plymouth Fury." Later that year, he published Pet Sematary, which he had written in the late 1970s, when his family was living near a highway that "used up a lot of animals" as a neighbor put it.
His daughter's cat was killed, and they buried it in a pet cemetery built by the local children. King imagined a burial ground beyond it that could raise the dead, albeit imperfectly. He initially found it too disturbing to publish, but resurrected it to fulfill his contract with Doubleday.
In 1985, King published Skeleton Crew, a book of short fiction including "The Reach" and The Mist. He recalls: "I would be asked, 'What happened in your childhood that makes you want to write those terrible things?' I couldn't think of any real answer to that. And I thought to myself, 'Why don't you write a final exam on horror, and put in all the monsters that everyone was afraid of as a kid?
Put in Frankenstein, the werewolf, the vampire, the mummy, the giant creatures that ate up New York in the old B movies. Put 'em all in there." These influences coalesced into It, about a group of seven children who are terrorized by the eponymous entity, which takes the form of its victims' fears and haunts the town of Derry, Maine.
He said he thought he was done writing about monsters, and wanted to "bring on all the monsters one last timeโฆand call it It." It won the August Derleth Award in 1987.
1987 was an unusually productive year for King. He published The Eyes of the Dragon, a high fantasy novel which he originally wrote for his daughter. The book was well received by critics (The New York Times praised its "pellucid" prose) but not some of King's fans, who resented his departure from horror.
He followed it with Misery, about a popular writer who is injured in a car wreck and held captive by his self-described "number-one fan". Misery shared the inaugural Bram Stoker Award with Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon. King says the novel's central conflict was a metaphor for addiction. He published The Tommyknockers, a science fiction novel filled, he says, with metaphors for addiction.
After its publication, King's wife staged an intervention, and he agreed to seek treatment. Two years later, he published The Dark Half, about an author who kills off his literary alter-ego, only to find he's taken on a life of his own. In the author's note, King writes that "I am indebted to the late Richard Bachman."
1990s: Four Past Midnight to Hearts in Atlantis
In 1990, King published Four Past Midnight, a collection of four novellas with the common theme of time. In 1991, he published Needful Things, his first novel since achieving sobriety, billed as "The Last Castle Rock Story". In 1992, he published Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne, two novels about women loosely linked by a solar eclipse.
The latter novel is narrated by the title character in an unbroken monologue; Mark Singer described it as "a morally riveting confession from the earthy mouth of a sixty-six-year-old Maine coastal-island native with a granite-hard life but not a grain of self-pity". King said he based the character of Claiborne on his mother.
In 1994, King's story "The Man in the Black Suit" was published in the Halloween issue of The New Yorker. The story went on to win the 1996 O. Henry Award. In 1996, King published The Green Mile, the story of a death row inmate, as a serial novel in six parts. It had the distinction of holding the first, fourth, tenth, twelfth, fourteenth, and fifteenth positions on the New York Times paperback-best-seller list at the same time.
In 1998, he published Bag of Bones, his first book with Scribner, about a recently widowed novelist. Several reviewers said that it showed King's maturation as a writer; Charles de Lint wrote "He hasn't forsaken the spookiness and scares that have made him a brand name, but he uses them more judiciously now... The present-day King has far more insight into the human condition than did his younger self, and better yet, all the skills required to share it with us." Bag of Bones won the Bram Stoker Award and August Derleth Award.
In 1999, he published The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, about a girl who gets lost in the woods and finds solace in listening to broadcasts of Boston Red Sox games, and Hearts in Atlantis, a book of linked novellas and short stories about coming of age in the 1960s. Later that year, King was hospitalized after being hit by a van.
Reflecting on the incident, he said "it occurs to me that I have nearly been killed by a character out of one of my own novels. It's almost funny." He said his nurses were "told in no uncertain terms, don't make any Misery jokes".
2000s: On Writing to Under the Dome
In 2000, King published On Writing, a mix of memoir and style manual which The Wall Street Journal called "a one-of-a-kind classic". Later that year he published Riding the Bullet, "the world's first mass e-book, with more than 500,000 downloads". Inspired by its success, he began publishing an epistolary horror novel, The Plant, in online installments using the pay what you want method provided by Amazon.com's Honor System.
He suggested readers pay $1 per installment, and said he'd only continue publishing if 75% of readers paid. When The Plant folded, the public assumed that King had abandoned the project because sales were unsuccessful, but King later said he had simply run out of stories. The unfinished novel is still available from King's official site, now free.
In 2002, King published From a Buick 8, a return to the territory of Christine. In 2005, he published the mystery The Colorado Kid for the Hard Case Crime imprint. In 2006, he published Cell, in which a mysterious signal broadcast over cell phones turns users into mindless killers. That same year, he published Lisey's Story, about the widow of a novelist.
He calls it his favorite of his novels, because "I've always felt that marriage creates its own secret world, and only in a long marriage can two people at least approach real knowledge about each other. I wanted to write about that, and felt that I actually got close to what I really wanted to say." In 2007, King served as guest editor for the annual anthology The Best American Short Stories.
In 2008, King published Duma Key, his first novel set in Florida, and the collection Just After Sunset. In 2009, it was announced he would serve as a writer for Fangoria. King's novel Under the Dome was published later that year, and debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times Bestseller List. Janet Maslin said of it, "Hard as this thing is to hoist, it's even harder to put down."
2010s: Full Dark, No Stars to The Institute
In 2010, King published Full Dark, No Stars, a collection of four novellas with the common theme of retribution. In 2011, he published 11/22/63, about a time portal leading to 1958, and an English teacher who travels through it to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. Errol Morris called it "one of the best time travel stories since H.
G. Wells". In 2013, he published Joyland, his second book for Hard Case Crime. Later that year, he published Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining.
During his Chancellor's Speaker Series talk at University of Massachusetts Lowell on December 7, 2012, King said that he was writing a crime novel about a retired policeman being taunted by a murderer, with the working title Mr. Mercedes. In an interview with Parade, he confirmed that the novel was "more or less" completed.
It was published in 2014 and won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. He returned to horror with Revival, which he called "a nasty, dark piece of work". King announced in June 2014 that Mr. Mercedes was part of a trilogy; the sequel, Finders Keepers, was published in 2015. The third book of the trilogy, End of Watch, was released in 2016.
In 2018, he released The Outsider, which features the character Holly Gibney, and the novella Elevation. In 2019, he released The Institute.
2020s: If It Bleeds to present
In 2020, King released If It Bleeds, a collection of four novellas. In 2021, he published Later, his third book for Hard Case Crime. In 2022, King released the novel Fairy Tale. Holly, about Holly Gibney was released in September 2023. In November 2023, the short story collection You Like It Darker, featuring twelve stories (seven previously published and five unreleased) was published by Scribner in May 2024.
The book debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times fiction best-seller list for the week ending May 25, 2024. King released Never Flinch, featuring Holly Gibney, in 2025.
Pseudonyms
King published five short novelsโRage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man (1982) and Thinner (1984)โunder the pseudonym Richard Bachman. He explains: "I did that because back in the early days of my career there was a feeling in the publishing business that one book a year was all the public would accept...eventually the public got wise to this because you can change your name but you can't really disguise your style." Bachman's surname is derived from the band BachmanโTurner Overdrive and his first name is a nod to Richard Stark, the pseudonym Donald E.
Westlake used to publish his darker work. The Bachman books are grittier than King's usual fare; King called his alter-ego "Dark-toned, despairing...not a very nice guy." A Literary Guild member praised Thinner as "what Stephen King would write like if Stephen King could really write."
Bachman was exposed as King's pseudonym in 1985 by Steve Brown, a Washington, D.C. bookstore clerk who noticed stylistic similarities between King and Bachman and located publisher's records at the Library of Congress that named King as the author of Rage. King announced Bachman's death from "cancer of the pseudonym".
King reflected that "Richard Bachman began his career not as a delusion but as a sheltered place where I could publish a few early books which I felt readers might like. Then he began to grow and come alive, as the creatures of a writer's imagination so frequently do... He took on his own reality, that's all, and when his cover was blown, he died." Originally, King planned Misery to be released under the pseudonym before his identity was discovered.
