The Full Biography
Stephen King. Writer. Portland and Bangor. The Maine teacher who made horror a national habit and then survived the van, the addiction, and his own productivity.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a paperback rack, a clown in a storm drain, a hotel hallway that is longer than it should be. The year might be 1974, when Carrie arrived, or 1980, when Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining put King’s hotel on a screen the author did not love. What the still cannot show is Stephen Edwin King of Portland, Maine, a boy whose father walked out, a high-school English teacher who wrote at night beside a stack of student papers, and a man who, after a van broke his body on a Maine road, sat down and wrote the book about how to write.
He was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland. His father, Donald Edwin King, was a merchant sailor who left the family when Stephen was two and did not come back. His mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King, raised Stephen and his older brother, David, on relatives’ spare rooms and on the kind of work a single woman could get in those years. They landed in Durham, Maine. The first pressure was not a publisher. It was a household that had to invent its own father, and a boy who found, in boxes of old paperbacks, the idea that a story could be a place you went when the house was thin.
He wrote as a child the way some children build forts. At Lisbon Falls High School he worked on the school paper. At the University of Maine in Orono he wrote columns, stories, and the kind of campus journalism that treats a small place as if it were the world. He graduated in 1970. In 1971 he married Tabitha Spruce, a writer he had met in the university library stacks. The marriage is the career’s other plot. She has been the first reader, the person who pulled a discarded manuscript out of the trash, and the reason the house in Maine stayed a house.
The years before Carrie are the ones the paperback rack erases. He pumped gas. He worked in an industrial laundry. He taught English at Hampden Academy. He sold short stories to men’s magazines because those magazines paid, and the rent did not care about prestige. Tabitha worked at Dunkin’ Donuts. They had three children: Naomi, Joe, Owen. The typewriter sat in the trailer. He has described those rooms without romance. The romance is what the country added after the checks cleared.
The door was a wastebasket. He threw away the start of a novel about a high-school girl with telekinetic power and a mother who used religion as a weapon. Tabitha took the pages out and told him to finish. Doubleday published Carrie in 1974. The hardcover was modest. The paperback sale was not. Brian De Palma’s 1976 film, with Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, made the name a national fact. A girl covered in blood at a prom is the image. The book under it is about class, evangelical weather, and what a town does to a child it has already decided to hate.
What followed was not a lucky streak. It was a run that still looks like a printing error. ’Salem’s Lot (1975) put vampires in a Maine town. The Shining (1977) put a recovering alcoholic and his family in the Overlook Hotel; Jack Nicholson’s axe, in Kubrick’s 1980 film, became the culture’s hotel, while King kept saying the book was about a father’s slide, not a maze. The Stand (1978) was a plague and a pilgrimage. The Dead Zone, Firestarter, Cujo, Christine, Pet Sematary, It (1986), Misery (1987): the 1980s were a decade in which a King title on a spine was a kind of weather. He also published as Richard Bachman, a second name, because the industry believed a writer could oversaturate a market. The secret lasted until a bookstore clerk did the math.
Different Seasons (1982) is the book people who claim not to read horror have already seen. Four novellas. Two of them became Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption — Rob Reiner and Frank Darabont taking the Maine storyteller’s non-horror and proving the voice was never only the clown. He has always been a writer about work, friendship, addiction, and small towns. The monsters were the advertisement. The people were the inventory. Beside the rack there was already another architecture: The Dark Tower, begun as a western-quest and stretched across decades, Roland of Gilead walking a world that is also Maine and also a bookshelf. The Talisman, with Peter Straub. The Eyes of the Dragon, a fairy tale he wrote for his daughter. Misery is a writer chained to a fan; people who know the van and the addiction hear more than a thriller. He has never been only the clown in the drain. He has been a working novelist who treats a year without a book as a kind of illness.
The addiction sat under the inventory. Cocaine, alcohol, a decade in which the output and the intake were both unsustainable. In the mid-1980s his family staged an intervention. He got clean. He has written about it in On Writing without asking for a medal. The books from the worst years still sell. He has not asked readers to throw them away. He has asked them to understand that a man can produce a monument and still be a problem in his own kitchen.
The scariest moment is always just before you start.Stephen King, On Writing
On June 19, 1999, on a road in western Maine, a van driven by Bryan Smith struck him while he walked. The injuries were massive: leg, hip, lung, a body that had to be rebuilt. Smith died the next year. King spent months in hospitals and in a hospital bed at home. He has said the pain was a country he did not wish to revisit. He went back to the desk anyway. On Writing, published in 2000, is a memoir and a craft book and a recovery document. It is the one King title a person who will never read It can be handed with a straight face.
The turn is not Carrie. The turn is the decision, after the van and the intervention, that the work would continue as a practice rather than as a binge. He slowed only by his own extreme standard. The books kept coming: Dreamcatcher, Lisey’s Story, the completion of the Dark Tower cycle, 11/22/63, Revival, the Bill Hodges novels, The Institute, Fairy Tale. He became, in old age, what he had been in the trailer: a man who shows up at the desk.
Six things most people never knew
- The father left when Stephen was two. Donald King walked out. Ruth raised the boys. The absent man is in more than one novel.
- Tabitha pulled Carrie out of the trash. The debut is a marriage story as much as a publishing story.
- He taught high-school English while the first books were written. Hampden Academy. Student papers by day. The trailer typewriter at night.
- Richard Bachman was a second spine. The industry thought one name was enough. A clerk proved otherwise.
- Different Seasons made two of the country’s favorite films. Stand by Me. The Shawshank Redemption. Horror was never the whole toolbox.
- The van was June 19, 1999. Route 5. Bryan Smith. The craft book came after the body was rebuilt.
Joe Hill, the older son, became a novelist under a name that was not a hiding so much as a wish to be read without the father’s weather. Owen writes too. Naomi went into ministry. The children grew up in Bangor, in a red Victorian on West Broadway that tourists photograph because the ironwork looks like a haunted house and because the man inside made haunted houses a Maine export. He and Tabitha have given money and books to local libraries and to the city with the stubbornness of people who never left. He still talks about Ruth, who held the household after Donald walked out, as the first editor the life ever had. The absent father and the present mother are in more books than a symbol-hunter can count. He does not need a symbol-hunter. He needs the next page.
The later years
Home is still Maine: the Bangor house, the place on the lakes, a life that looks, from the road, like a successful local business that happens to be literature. He writes every morning that the health allows. He watches baseball. He posts, in the years of the public internet, with the unfiltered speed of a man who has already survived worse reviews than a stranger’s reply. He has been, for a long stretch, the most famous living American writer who does not pretend the job is priestcraft. He has called himself, with a salesman’s honesty, the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries. The sentence is a joke and a ledger. Hundreds of millions of copies. A short-story count that sits near two hundred. A novel count that makes younger writers tired to read aloud.
Honors arrived after the paperback rack had already done the coronation. The National Book Foundation gave him its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003; some of the literary weather objected, as if popular fear were a lesser craft. He accepted and kept writing. The National Medal of Arts came in 2015 from President Barack Obama. The Mystery Writers of America had already named him a Grand Master. He has used the podium, when he has taken one, to talk about libraries, about working writers, about the American habit of sneering at the books people actually finish.
The civic file in Bangor is as stubborn as the output. He and Tabitha have funded libraries, scholarships, a radio station, the kind of local checks that do not require a gala in New York. The Victorian on West Broadway still draws the tour vans; they have learned to live with the vans the way a coastal town lives with fog. He throws out a first pitch when the Red Sox or a local club ask. He argues, in public, about politics and books with the same unfiltered speed. The novels of the last fifteen years — Mr. Mercedes and its companions, 11/22/63’s long afterlife, The Outsider, The Institute, Fairy Tale, the Holly Gibney books — are the work of a man who could have retired on It and declined. Tabitha has published her own novels; the marriage remains two desks. Joe Hill’s books stand on a separate shelf and still get asked about the father. King has said, more than once, that the job is to put the words down before breakfast wins. Breakfast has not been winning.
The screen adaptations became a second industry he does not have to run. Some he likes. Some he does not. Kubrick’s The Shining remains the famous argument; King made his own television version in 1997 because he wanted the father’s slide back at the center. Misery (1990) gave Kathy Bates an Oscar. The Shawshank Redemption found its audience on video and then never left the culture. The 2017 It made a new generation flinch at a drain. He has taken cameo roles, written teleplays, and generally behaved like a man who understands that once a story is sold, it goes out into the weather.
He is in his seventies. The Portland boy, the Durham reader, the Hampden teacher, the husband Tabitha saved from a wastebasket, the addict, the man on Route 5, the Bangor neighbor, and the writer who still fills a morning page are the same person. He has not retired. He has said he will stop when the work stops being fun, which, from the output, has not happened. The desk is still in Maine. The stack is still growing. The first paperbacks are still in the rack at the airport.
There is no death date on this life. There is a present tense: a desk in Maine, a wife in the next room or the next chair, children who write and preach, a city that has learned to live with the tour buses, and a shelf that keeps getting longer while the first paperbacks refuse to die.
After the spotlight moved
It did not move. It multiplied. New readers still find Carrie in a high-school backpack and The Shining on a rainy night. The films keep the name in rooms that do not buy hardcovers. Bangor still has the Victorian. Tabitha is still the first fact under the famous one.
He came out of Portland, lost a father, married a writer who rescued a manuscript, taught school, scared a country for fifty years, got clean, got broken on a Maine road, and then wrote the book that teaches other people how to begin. If you only remember the clown, you have the still. If you remember the trailer, the wastebasket, the intervention, and the van, you have him.
Portrait: Pinguino Kolb · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons