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Here are some interesting facts about Stephen King's life
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Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947 at the General Hospital in Portland, Maine. The
only natural-born son of Donald and Ruth King, two-year-old Stephen saw his family suddenly shrink in size when his father--whose
name was Donald Spansky before he legally changed it to King---took a walk, litlerally, abandoning his family. Saying
he was going out for a pack of cigarettes, Donald King left behind his wife, young Stephen, and adopted son, David, and was
never heard from again.
Scrambling to make ends meet, Ruth King kept what was left of her family together by living with
relatives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Stratford, Connecticut. Eventually settling down in Durham, Maine, she shouldered
the additional responsibility of caring for her ailing parents, then in their eighties.
At a time when other kids began to seriously explore the world at large, Stephen King---an ungainly
youth, oversized for his age, and clearly a social outsider, a misfit---explored a world within, dreaming up stories that
took him as far away as possible from Durham, Maine, a rural town off the beaten track.
The King home was near what locals called Methodist's Corner, so named because of the West Durham
United Methodist Church, which stands at a nearby intersection. From the front porch of their modest two-story house,
Stephen King could see across an empty windswept field to Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Oren's house.
Stephen King remembers how difficult life was in those days. In an interview with WB, Waldenbooks's
free magazine, he said he had grown up poor, and that when the well went dry in the summer, there was no more water in the
house. The blue outhouse in the back was where, he told another interviewer, he sat and contemplated his life;
and in the winter, he and his brother were literally steaming when they returned from hot showers at their aunt and uncle's
house.
Though King had friends locally---often King preferred his solitude, so he could write. His
constant companion was a battered Underwood typewriter that belonged to his older brother, David, who used it for typing on
the waxy mimeograph stencils for "Dave's Rag," a self-published neighborhood newspaper. --Stephen
King Country
King's memory is a fogged-out landscape from which occasional memories appear like isolated trees...the
kind that look as if they might like to grab and eat you.
"My earliest memory is of imagining I was someone else---imagining that I was, in fact, the Ringling
Brothers Circus Strongboy. This was at my Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Oren's house in Durham, Maine. My aunt remembers
this quite clearly, and says I was two and a half or maybe three years old. I had found a cement cinderblock in a corner
of the garage and had mamaged to pick it up. I carried it slowly across the garage's smooth cement floor, except in
my mind I was dressed in an animal skin singlet(probably a leopard skin) and carrying the cinderblock across the center ring.
The vast crowd was silent. A brilliant blue white spotlight marked my remarkable progress. Their wondering faces
told the story: never had they seen such an incredibly strong kid. "And he's only two!" someone muttered in disbelief.
Unknown to me, wasps had constructed a small nest in the lower half of the cinderblock. One
of them, perhaps pissed off at being relocated, flew out and stung me on the ear. The pain was brilliant, like a poisonous
inspiration. It was the worst pain I had ever suffered in my short life, but it only held the top spot for a few seconds.
When I dropped the cinderblock on one bare foot, mashing all five toes, I forgot all about the wasp. I can't remember
if I was taken to the doctor, and neither can my Aunt Ethelyn but she remembers the sting, the mashed toes, and my reaction.
"How you howled, Stephen!" she said. "You were certainly in fine voice that day."
This is a humorous and interesting story Stephen King accounts of his early childhood. I enjoyed
reading it.
"Most of the first grade I spent in bed, starting with the measles and then getting steadily
worse. I got bout after bout of strep throat, at some point my ears got involved and one day my mother took me
to a specialist. The doctor looked in my ears then he laid me down on his table and put a large absorbant cloth underneath
my head. I should have known something was rotten in Denmark. Who knows, maybe I did. There was a sharp
smell of alcohol. I saw the needle in his hand and tensed. The ear doctor smiled reassuringly and spoke the lie
for which doctors should be immediatly jailed: "Relax, Stevie, this wont hurt." I believed him." "He slid the
needle into my ear and punctured my eardrum with it. 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. The puncturing of my eardrum
was pain beyond the world. I screamed. I lifted my head and looked unbelievingly at the doctor and the nurse.
The next week my mother took me back to the ear doctor. Once again I was on my side, there was the smell of alcohol
and then the needle appeared. He once more assured me that it wouldn't hurt, and I once more believed him. It
DID hurt. Almost as much as the first time. They told me it was over and I believed that for about 5 days and
then was again taken to the ear doctor. Since the repeated eardrum-lancings when I was six, one of my life's firmest
principles has been this: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times,
shame on both of us. The third time on the ear doctor's table I struggled, and screamed and thrashed and fought.
The finally called my mother in and they managed to hold me down long enought for the doctor to get his needle in. I
screamed so loud and so long that I can still hear it."
"That year my brother David jumped ahead to the fourth grade and I was pulled out of school entirely.
I had missed too much of the first grade. Most of that year I spent either in bed or housebound. I read a ton
of comic books and at some poing began to write my own stories. I began to copy my comics word for word and eventually
showed one of these copycat hybrids to my mother, and she was charmed. She asked me if I had made the story up myself,
and I was forced to admit that I had copied most of it out of a funnybook. "Write one of your own Stevie," she said.
"Those Combat Casey funnybooks are just junk--he's always knocking someone's teeth out. I bet you could do better.
Write one of your own." And so it all began.
-On Writing-
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In 1962, Stephen King commuted to high school in nearby Lisbon Falls, Maine, a mill town to the northeast.
Along with the other kids from Durham, he rode in a converted hearse that belonged to Mike's Taxi Service of Lisbon.
Because he was not a jock who would cover himself with glory on the gridiron---in fact, he got cleat
marks up his back as a left tackle on the football team--and not an egghead, King had to find his own identity, his own niche,
and so defined himself in terms of his writing, which drew some unwanted attention.
From 1966-1970, Stephen King--following in his adopted brother's footsteps---moved to Orono, where
he attended the University of Maine. As UMO professor Burton Hatlen pointed out, UM was where bright Mainers went if
they couldn't afford a prestigious Ivy League school.
A determined writer, King frequently published fiction and poetry in college literary magazines.
While an undergraduate, Stephen King began writing book-length fiction such as Getting It On, The
Long Walk, and Sword in The Darkness. Though none
of the novels sold, King's short fiction fared better.
During his senior year, while working part-time at the university library, Stephen King met Tabitha
Jane Spruce, a kindred spirit who shared his enthusiasm for writing.
King graduated from college on June 5, 1970 and moved into a cabin near the Stillwater River and,
despite his inability to sell a novel, he began writing The Dark Tower. After hammering out
the first few chapters on his manual Underwood typewriter, he showed the sheaf of pages to Chris Chesley, whom he knew would
tell him exactly what he thought of the work. Chesley read the first few pages and told King that it was the best thing
he had written in years. But pressed that King must find a job since writing wasnt going to pay the bills.
Unable to find a teaching job, King took a job pumping gas for $1.25 an hour at a gas station near Orono. He moved up
from that to working at an industrial laundry in Bangor where he earned $1.60 an hour.
In January 1971, Stephen and Tabitha married. Wearing a borrowed suit, Stephen King had to
take time off from his job at the laundry. Although the management wished him well, he was still docked a half a day's
pay.
King had some considerable trouble publishing any of his work and money was tight. The years
from 1971-1973 were the most difficult of King's life. Always short of money and unable to sell anything but short stories,
King justifiably questioned his future as a writer. King realized that he wasn't going to set the literary world on
fire anytime soon, so when a teaching position opened at Hampton Academy, he took the job at a starting salary of $6,400.
In 1972, King suffered writer's block, the inevitable result of his stressful life. Incapable
of writing a new story, King picked up the bare bones of one he had begun earlier that summer, which he hoped would be a quick
sale to Cavalier.
It was a story about an ugly duckling of a girl named Carietta White, who was constantly being dumped
on by her classmates. But after a few pages, King threw them in the trash, realizing he was writing on a subject he
knew nothing about: a girl having her first menstrual period in a girl's locker room at school.
Tabitha fished the pages out and encouraged Stephen to continue. King decided to go for broke.
In for a penny, in for a pound, he invested even more time in the story, but considered it to be a certified loser.
King reluctantly sent in Carrie and got the usual nibble, but nothing more. King crossed his fingers and rewrote
the book hoping that it would increase the odds in his favor. A month after meeting with his potential editor, King
got the word. The telegram, sent to King's house, was short and sweet:
"Carrie" officially a Doubleday book. $2,500 advance against royalties.
Congrats, kid--the future lies ahead. Bill.
After fourteen years of pounding the typewriter and collecting
enough rejection slips to paper his wall, Stephen King finally sold a novel.
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King's early books--the ones at Doubleday--show the work of a demon-driven writer whose fiction
has a distinctive visceral feel that cuts tto the bone. These were the days when King clearly wrote for himself, largely
unaffected by his growing readership and by the critics. In the middle period--the eighties--King's prolificacy and
desire to experament with his prose inevitably resulted in a wide range of material, with varying results: Tommyknockers,
a science fiction/ horror novel; on the other, a sharply focused study of psychological terror, Misery. Unlike
the eighties, the nineties would be for King a decade of closure, both proffesionally and personally.
In 1991 King explored Castle Rock one last time in a long novel, Needful Things. Deciding that
it was time to move on, King laid waste to the town in a spectacular fire. Castle Rock, like Jerusalem's Lot in 'Salem's
Lot, was history, he said.
That year King also published The Dark Tower III followed by Gerald's Game in 1992, Dolores
Claiborne in 1993, Nightmares and Dreamscapes in 1993, Insomnia in 1994, Rose Madder in 1995, followed by Six Stories which
was self published. 1996 proved to be a banner year for King, who had a record eight books on the best-seller lists:
six installments of a serialized novel, The Green Mile, paving the way for "twinner" books, Desperation(by king) and The Regulators(by
Bachman), which featured the same characters in different settings. In 1997 King published The Dark Tower IV: Wizard
and Glass.
King was having considerable moral and professional problems with his current publisher and knew
it was time for a change. King left for a much needed vacation to Australia and rode a Harley across it's plains.
Meanwhile King's agent/lawyer/business manager Arthur Greene dropped the bombshell: King was looking for a new home, and it
was time for publishers to place their bets. When the dust settled, Scribner emerged victorious.
Bag of Bones, a hefty 529-page novel, was evolutionary, his new publisher said. Characterized
by King as a "haunted love story," it was clearly written to showcase a new Stephen King.
Insofar as King's fiction is concerned, if Bag Of Bones is any indication, his best is yet to come.
With all his successes, however, Stephen King has never lost sight of the reason all of these things have happened to him.
-Stephen King Country-
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