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Stephen King biography, information, personal life
Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King (eng.
Stephen Edwin King; b.
September 21, 1947, Portland, Maine, USA) is an American writer working in a variety of genres, including horror, thriller, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, drama; he received the nickname - "The King of Horrors".
More than 350 million copies of his books have been sold, based on which a number of feature films, television productions, and comics have been drawn.
King has published 50 novels, including 7 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, and 5 non fiction books.
He wrote about 200 short stories, most of which were collected in nine author's collections.
Many of his stories are set in his home state of Maine.
For his work, King received the Bram Stoker Award, the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Society Award, his novella "The Intermediate Station" was a candidate for the Nebula Award, and his short story "The Man in the Black Suit" received the O. Henry Award.
In 2003, the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Outstanding contributions to American literature.
He has also received awards for his contribution to literature throughout his career, such as the "Contribution to World Fantasy" Awards (2004), was awarded by the Canadian Booksellers Association (2007) and the title of Grand Master from the American Mystery Writers (2007).
Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947 in Portland, Maine, to Merchant Marine captain Donald Edward King and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury, who were already raising a two year old adopted son, David Victor ( The Kings went to adopt a newborn boy in September 1945, when doctors reported that Ruth would not be able to bear her children; the diagnosis of "infertility" turned out to be erroneous).
Translated from English, his surname King means "king".
The writer owes his surname to his father, who changed his Polish surname "Spenski" to the more sonorous English "King"
In 1949, when Stephen was two years old, his father Donald left the house one evening for cigarettes and did not return.
His fate remained unclear for a long time for Stephen and David, until in the late 1990s they learned that their father had started another family and lived nearby with his wife from Brazil with four children, until he died in 1980.
In 1949-1958, Ruth, David and Stephen King spent several years moving from place to place.
They managed to live in Chicago, in Fort Wayne (Indiana), in Malden (Massachusetts), in West De Pere (Wisconsin), in Stratford (Connecticut), until they finally settled in West Durham, a town 30 miles from Scarborough (Maine).
In 1950, four year old Stephen witnessed the death of his peer who was hit by a freight train — a circumstance that Steve himself, according to his own words, completely forgot about, having suffered a state of shock, but remembered a few years later when he was told about it.
Due to frequent travel and poor health, Stephen suffered from measles, then acute pharyngitis, which eventually spread to his ears and turned into an extremely unpleasant form of ear infection that could not be treated with antibiotics.
I had to seek medical help from an otolaryngologist, who pierced the boy's eardrum three times with a sterile needle to drain the infected fluid.
According to King's recollections, more than the hellish pain of punctures, he was tormented by the consciousness that the doctor had lied all three times, saying that it would not hurt, and he himself did not even bother to remember the patient's name.
Due to illness, Stephen had to stay in the first grade for the second year.
Distracted from the pain, the boy, with the encouragement of his mother, began to write small stories from the age of 12 — the first of them was called "Mr. Sly Rabbit" and told about a white rabbit and three of his friends animals traveling around the city in search of children in trouble to help them out.
At the same time, the boy is passionately fond of reading books, mass viewing of horror comics (such as "Tales from the Crypt", "Tomb of Horrors", "Crypt of Horror", "Madness", "Spider Man", "Superman", "Hulk") and movies (especially black and white and second rate "horror movies").
The very first horror movie that he watched was "The Creature from the Black Lagoon", Stephen was really scared after watching the cartoon "Bambi" — because of the scene of a forest fire, the boy had nightmares for several weeks.
He also remembers listening to Ray Bradbury's radio play "Mars is Paradise".
In the late 1950s, the attention of eleven year old Steve, like most Americans, was captured by a series of bloody atrocities committed by 19 year old Charles Starkweather and his 14 year old girlfriend Caryl Fugate (together they killed 11 people in Nebraska and Wyoming).
Stephen collected a whole album of newspaper clippings about Starkweather's crimes.
Stephen began his career as a writer in January 1959, when, together with his older brother David, he decided to publish his own local city newspaper.
The brothers created a local news bulletin called "Dave's Leaf", reproduced each issue on an old mimeograph and distributed it to their neighbors in West Durham for 5 cents per copy.
Dave was responsible for local news, and Steve wrote reviews of his favorite TV shows and movies, as well as short stories.
Around the same time, the boy got acquainted with the work of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who became one of his favorite authors; in an interview in 2009, King said that one day, rummaging through a pile of old father's books in the attic, he found a collection of Lovecraft stories in a soft yellow cover.
This collection was called "Lurking in the Shadows", and when reading all these sinister stories, Steve felt a sense of"coming home".
In 1960, he and his friend Chris Chesley published several short stories in a self made collection "People, Places and Things" (English: People, Places and Things).
A year later, the second book was published, "Star Invaders" (eng.
The Star Invaders).
In 1966, King graduated from high school and entered the University of Maine, where he met his future wife, Tabitha Spruce.
Among King's teachers was the famous literary critic Carroll Terrell, who later published a book about his student, Stephen King: a Man and an Artist (Stephen King: man and artist; 1990).
In 1970, King graduated from the university with a bachelor's degree, and he was declared unfit for military service.
At first, the family experienced financial difficulties, they lived on King's salary in the laundry, his wife's student loan and King's rare royalties for publishing stories in magazines.
At this time, they had a son and a daughter.
In 1971, King married Tabitha.
In the fall of the same year, he began working as an English teacher at a school in Hampden (Maine).
His wife found a draft of the novel "Carrie" in the trash, which King considered unsuccessful, and insisted that King finish it.
On December 18, 1973, Stephen's mother, Ruth King, died in Mexico City, at the home of his brother Dave.
In 1974, Doubleday published the novel Carrie, for which King received an advance of $ 2,500.
Then the publishing house sold the copyright to "Carrie" to the publishing house " NAL " for $400,000, of which King received half, which allowed him to leave his job at the school.
In the fall of 1974, King moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he lived for a year, and during this time wrote the novel "The Shining".
In the late 1970s, King, under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, published his early novel "Put up with It" under the title "Rage".
The book was withdrawn from sale, after real cases of school shootings began to occur in Kansas, a juvenile delinquent who killed three of his classmates was found to have an edition of this book, after which the author himself decided to withdraw the book from sale.
Around 1977, the time came for young filmmakers, usually undergraduates, many wrote to him that they wanted to film some of his short stories, such as" Night Shift"; despite the objections of the adviser, who saw a huge number of potential legal problems in this, King introduced a policy that he adheres to this day.
He is ready to give any student director the opportunity to adapt one of his short stories (not a novel, it would be ridiculous).
He asks to sign a paper according to which the directors promise that without his approval, which he will give only after watching the finished version of the film sent to him, no film will go into wide distribution.
For this right, he asks for one dollar.
He calls it a dollar deal, his accountant grabs his head every time, this has already happened 16-17 times at the time of signing the contract.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Stephen King published the books "Rage", "Long Walk", "Road Works", "Running Man", and "Losing Weight"under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
The idea was to see if he could repeat his success again, as he was afraid that his success was an accident, a combination of circumstances.
There is another explanation, which is that the publication standards of that time allowed only one book per year.
The surname Bachman was not taken by chance, he is a fan of the musical group "Bachman Turner Overdrive".
The pseudonym Richard Bachman was exposed by a bookstore clerk from Washington, Steve Brown, who noticed similarities between King's old works and Bachman's new works, he discovered King's last name on one of Bachman's novels in the Library of Congress.
This led to a press release foreshadowing the imminent death of Bachman, allegedly from "cancer".
This pseudonym has a fictional biography.
The books of Bachman, allegedly deceased (who died of "pseudonym cancer"), were also published by his fictional widow, Claudia Innes Bachman.
Interestingly, Claudia is mentioned in the cycle "The Dark Tower" as the author of the book "Charlie Choo Choo" in the key world (in other worlds, the author is the fictional Beryl Evans).
In the book, her name is spelled differently (Claudia and Innes Bachman — 19 letters).
We can say that Claudia Bachman is also King's pseudonym.
King also used other pseudonyms, such as John Sweeten for the novel "The Fifth Quarter".
King dedicated his 1989 book "The Dark Half" to this story, about how the pseudonym became flesh and took the place of the writer, "dedicated to the late Richard Bachman", and in 1996, when Stephen King's novel "Hopelessness" was published, and with it the novel "Regulators", where the last name Bachman was indicated as the author.
In 1982, the book "The Shooter" appeared — the first novel from the series "The Dark Tower".
In the same year, in just 10 days, he wrote a 304 page novel "The Running Man", which he told about in "Memoirs of the Craft".
In 1985, Stephen King admitted that he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
In 1989, King signed a contract with the publishing house "Viking", according to which he was supposed to receive $35 million for the next four books, but in 1997 he terminated it, because he planned to receive $17 million for the book"Bag of Bones".
To do this, he signed a new contract with the publishing house "Simon & Schuster", under which he received $8 million in advance for the book and 50% of sales revenue.
In 1996, The Green Mile was written.
In 1998, King became the author of the script for one of the episodes of the popular TV series of that time "The X Files".
The series titled "Chinga" aired on February 8 on Fox, starring actors Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny.
In 2006, during a press conference in London, King announced that he had found another Bachman novel, called "Blaze".
It was published on June 12, 2007.
In fact, the original manuscript was written by King while studying at the University of Maine and was kept there for many years, and King was listed as an expert.
King completely rewrote the original 1973 manuscript for publication.
On June 19, 1999, at approximately 4: 30, while walking King, in Lovell, Maine, driver Brian Smith was distracted by his dog, as a result of which he ran over King in his minibus, which flew into a ditch and rolled into a hole located 14 feet from the pavement of route 5.
According to a statement by Oxford County Sheriff's Deputy Matt Baker, King was hit from behind, some witnesses reported that the driver was not speeding, he was also not drunk.
King was conscious enough to give the family numbers to the deputy sheriff to contact his family, but he was in pain.
The author was first taken to the North Cumberland Hospital in Bridgeton, and then was taken by helicopter to the Maine Central Medical Center in Lewiston.
He suffered a damaged right lung, multiple fractures of his right leg, a head wound and a femoral fracture, and was kept on an artificial respiration machine until July 9.
The damage to the leg was so great that the doctors initially proposed amputation, but they managed to save the leg thanks to a rigid fixation.
After five operations in ten days and physical therapy, King began writing again in July, although his femur was still broken and he could only sit for about forty minutes before the pain worsened and soon became unbearable.
He later described this event in his memoirs "How to Write Books "and in the seventh part of" The Dark Tower", including introducing the" sacred " numbers — 19 and 99 into the plot.
King also took part in the creation of a mini TV series of fifteen episodes called "The Royal Hospital", which features a similar event.
King's lawyer and his attorneys tried to prevent the sale of Smith's minivan from eBay and buy it.
To King's great disappointment, the minivan was later crushed in a landfill, he dreamed of smashing it with a baseball bat after he could walk.
In an interview for the magazine Fresh Air, given to Terry Gross, he admitted that after he still wanted to completely destroy the car.
During this time, Tabitha King was engaged in the design of his studio, after King visited there, he said that he saw what his studio would look like if he died — this gave him ideas for the novel "The Story of Lizzie".
On September 21, 2001, the author's birthday, two years after the accident, Brian Smith died of a drug overdose.
In 2004, the last part of the epic "The Dark Tower" was released, which, according to the writer's promises, should be his last work.
But King does not keep his promise and continues to publish books.
In 2009, Stephen King finally published the novel "Under the Dome", which he tried unsuccessfully to write twice in the 1970s and 1980s.
In 2011, the novel "11/22/63" was published.
In 2012, the eighth volume of the cycle about the Dark Tower, "The Wind through the Keyhole", was published.
King also wrote two novels: "Doctor Sleep", the sequel to the novel "The Shining", and "The Land of Joy", written in the detective genre.
Both novels were released in 2013.
In addition, in 2010, King starred in the 3rd episode of the 3rd season of the TV series "Sons of Anarchy" as a cleaner named Bachman.
In 2011, he became the hero of comic books written by Michael Lent and Brian McCarthy, which were based on his biography.
In 2014, the novels "Mr. Mercedes" and "Renaissance"were published.
The personal life of Stephen King:
King and his wife own three houses, one in Bangor, one in Lovell, Maine, and in the winter they regularly visit the waterfront mansion located on the Gulf of Mexico, in Sarasota, Florida.
He and Tabitha have three children, Naomi, Joe and Owen, and three grandchildren.
In 1999, a letter was published in the satirical newspaper "The Onion", allegedly from King, who stated that he could not remember how he wrote Tomminokers and several other novels, because " after the 50-60 th novel, everything merges."
Although the article was only ironic about his exceptional fecundity, "writing", nevertheless, King's problems with alcohol and drug addiction in the 80s were so serious that in 2000 he admitted in "On Writing": "I really donot remember how I wrote Tomminokers and many other things published during the decade."
Shortly after the novel was published, his family and friends staged an intervention, collected evidence of his addiction taken from garbage, including beer cans, cigarette butts, grams of cocaine, valium, xanax and marijuana, and dumped it on the carpet in front of him.
As King writes in his memoirs, " after that, I turned to doctors, decided to stop not only with drugs, but also with alcohol," and since the late 1980s, he has remained sober.
The first novel he wrote after giving up drugs and alcohol was "The Right Things".
Tabitha King has published nine novels of her own.
Both of the writer's sons are published authors: Owen published his first collection of short stories, "We are All Together: Novellas and Short Stories", in 2005.
Joseph Hillstrom King, who writes under the professional pseudonym Joe Hill, published a collection of short stories, "Ghosts of the 20th Century" , in 2005.
His debut novel, A Heart Shaped Box, was published in 2007 and will be adapted into a feature film directed by Neil Jordan.
King's daughter Naomi is still in a relationship with a woman named Tandeka, who works as a school theology teacher.
King is a fan of baseball and the Boston Red Sox team in particular, he often attends the team's games, and sometimes mentions it in his novels and stories.
In 1992, the King couple sponsored the construction of the Mansfield Stadium, and in 2002, Stephen made the first "pitch" at the opening match of the International Senior Baseball League.
He helped coach his son Owen's (Bangor West) team to the Maine Minor League Championship in 1989.
He talks about his experience in the New Yorker through an essay called "Upside Down", which is also presented in the collection "Nightmares and Fantasies".
In 2014, Stephen King took part in the famous flash mob "Ice Bucket Challenge", the meaning of which is to pour ice water in front of the camera and raise charity funds for patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Filmography of Stephen King:
1982 " Kaleidoscope of horrors "(episode "The Lonely Death of Geordie Verill") Geordie Verill
1986 "Maximum acceleration" a person withdrawing money from an ATM
1986 "David Cronenberg: Long Live the New Flesh" cameo
1987 "Kaleidoscope of Horrors 2" (episode "Fellow Traveler") truck driver
1989 "Pet Cemetery" priest
1989" It's a Horror " cameo
1991 "Golden Years" bus driver
1992 "Lunatics" cemetery watchman
1994 "The Confrontation" (parts 3 and 4) Teddy Weizak
1994 "Baseball" cameo (voice)
1995 "Langoliers" Tom Holby, Craig Toomey's boss
1996 "Losing weight" Mr. Bangor, a pharmacist in a pharmacy
1997 "Radiance, TV series" by Gage Creed, frontman of the Gage Creed Band
1999 "Storm of the Century" lawyer in TV advertising
2002 Mansion "Red Rose" pizza delivery man
2004 Royal Hospital (TV series) maintenance Worker Johnny B. Goode
2005 Breakfast at Cafe Gotham Mr. Ring
2007 "Diaries of the Dead" newsreader (uncredited)
2009 "Sons of Anarchy" "Cleaner"
2012 "Stuck in Love" cameo
2013 Under the Dome (TV series) cafe visitor
The novels of Stephen King:
1974 Carrie Carrie (film adaptation: 1976, 2002, 2013)
1975 Salem's Lot (film adaptation: 1979, 2004)
1977 The Shining (film adaptation: 1980, 1997)
1978 Confrontation of The Stand (film adaptation: 1994)
1979 The Dead Zone The Dead Zone (film adaptation: 1983, 2002-2007)
1980 Igniting the look of Firestarter (film adaptation: 1984)
1981 Cujo Cujo (film adaptation: 1983)
1983 Kristina Christine (film adaptation: 1983)
1983 Pet Sematary Pet Sematary (film adaptation: 1989)
1983 Cycle of the Werewolf Cycle of the Werewolf (film adaptation: 1985)
1984 The Talisman The Talisman
1986 It's It (film adaptation: 1990)
1987 The Eyes of the Dragon The Eyes of the Dragon
1987 Misery Misery (film adaptation: 1990)
1987 Tommyknockers The Tommyknockers (film adaptation: 1993)
1989 The Dark Half of The Dark Half (film adaptation: 1993)
1991 Necessary Things Necessary Things (film adaptation: 1993)
1992 Gerald's Game Gerald's Game
1992 Dolores Claiborne (film adaptation: 1995)
1994 Insomnia Insomnia
1995 Rose Madder Rose Madder
1996 The Green Mile The Green Mile (film adaptation: 1999)
1996 Hopeless Desperation (film adaptation: 2006)
1998 Bag of Bones Bag of Bones (film adaptation: 2011)
1999 The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
2001 Dreamcatcher Dreamcatcher (film adaptation: 2003)
2001 Black House Black House
2002 Almost like a Buick From a Buick
2005 The Colorado Kid (film adaptation: 2010)
2006 Cell Mobile Phone
2006 The Story of Lisey Lisey's Story
2008 Duma Key Duma Key
2009 Under the Dome Under the Dome (film adaptation: 2013)
2011 11/22/63 11/22/63
2013 The Country of joy Joyland
2013 Doctor Sleep Doctor Sleep
2014 Mr. Mercedes Mr. Mercedes
2014 Revival Revival
2015 What fell is gone Finders Keepers
Stephen King aphorisms, quotes, sayings >>>
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