Stephen King

Stephen King is known by many as a successful author, but every author is only as good as his or her works. King has produced various types of works such as short stories, novels, novellas, screenplays, and comics. His work has been the “most important bridge between the horror genre and literary respectability from the late 1960s and 1970s up to the present time” (Hoppenstand 3). Stephen Edwin King was born September 21, 1947 in Portland, Maine. He is the second son of Donald Edwin and Nellie Ruth King. When King was two years old, his father, a captain in the merchant marines, went out to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Nellie, King’s mother, raised King and his adopted older brother David. The family under the care of Nellie experienced many hardships and moved often as she looked for work. The family lived in Maine, Massachusetts, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana. When King was six years old, the family finally settled in Stratford, Connecticut (Hoppenstand 8; Stephen King).

In 1958, when King was eleven years old, the family moved to Durham, Maine. This was where King discovered that he had something in common with his father. In the attic of his aunt and uncle’s garage he discovered an old trunk that contained a box of his father’s books, including some by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, and some of his father’s attempts as writing short stories. King’s teachers reported that one of his greatest passions was writing stories of his own, which he started doing at age six (Hoppenstand 8; Stephen King). Stephen King’s life has influenced his works and served as an important source of inspiration, which is evident in his education and early writing experiences, his pseudonym Richard Bachman, and his near-fatal acc...

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...hard Bachman, but it’s not true. I know him and I believe he lives in Connecticut”; “ I am not Richard Bachman, I know who he is, and I can’t tell”; ”Bachman is indeed a pen-name, for a superannuated hippie-type who lives in New Hampshire. I know who he is, and tell you with no qualms at all that he is authentically crazy” (Wood 148). King credits the name for his pseudonym to a book by Richard Matheson that was on his desk and Bachman-Turner Overdrive that was playing on the radio when his publisher called to ask what pseudonym he wanted to use (Wood 148).

King has become familiar even to those who have not read any of his works. Although he tries to maintain a degree of privacy for himself and his family he does have a high public profile. King was in the news in 1999 when he was struck by a van while out for his daily walk and suffered near-fatal injuries.