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Stephen King — news, coverage & facts — IJR

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 (née 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 "It’s built in. That’s 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 Matheson—I 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 hands—strong 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."

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 latent—and then, as the novel progresses, developing—telekinetic 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 — 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 time…and 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".

Pseudonyms

King published five short novels—Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man (1982) and Thinner (1984)—under 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 Bachman–Turner 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.

When Desperation (1996) was released, the companion novel The Regulators was published as a "discovered manuscript" by Bachman. In 2006, King announced that he had discovered another Bachman novel, Blaze, which was published the following year. The original manuscript had been held at the University of Maine for many years and had been covered by numerous King experts. King rewrote the original 1973 manuscript for its publication.

King has used other pseudonyms. In 1972, the short story "The Fifth Quarter" was published under the name John Swithen (a Carrie character) in Cavalier. Charlie the Choo-Choo: From the World of The Dark Tower was published in 2016 under the pseudonym Beryl Evans and illustrated by Ned Dameron. It is adapted from a fictional book central to the plot of King's The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands.

Style

In On Writing, King recalls:When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer (Mark Singer) that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn't believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. And I do. Stories aren't souvenir tee-shirts or GameBoys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small, a seashell. Sometimes it's enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.King often starts with a "what-if" scenario, asking what would happen if an alcoholic writer was stranded with his family in a haunted hotel (The Shining), or if one could see the outcome of future events (The Dead Zone), or if one could travel in time to alter the course of history (11/22/63). He writes that "The situation comes first. The characters—always flat and unfeatured, to begin with—come next. Once these things are fixed in my mind, I begin to narrate. I often have an idea of what the outcome may be, but I have never demanded a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things their way. In some instances, the outcome is what I visualized. In most, however, it's something I never expected."

Joyce Carol Oates called King "both a storyteller and an inventor of startling images and metaphors, which linger long in the memory." An example of King's imagery is seen in The Body when the narrator recalls a childhood clubhouse with a tin roof and rusty screen door: "No matter what time of day you looked out that screen door, it looked like sunset... When it rained, being inside the club was like being inside a Jamaican steel drum." King writes that "The use of simile and other figurative language is one of the chief delights of fiction—reading it and writing it, as well. [...] By comparing two seemingly unrelated objects—a restaurant bar and a cave, a mirror and a mirage—we are sometimes able to see an old thing in a new and vivid way. Even if the result is mere clarity instead of beauty, I think writer and reader are participating together in a kind of miracle. Maybe that's drawing it a little strong, but yeah—it's what I believe."

Themes

When asked if fear was his main subject, King said "In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that's inexplicable to you, whether it's the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we're still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts."

Joyce Carol Oates said that "Stephen King's characteristic subject is small-town American life, often set in fictitious Derry, Maine; tales of family life, marital life, the lives of children banded together by age, circumstance, and urgency, where parents prove oblivious or helpless. The human heart in conflict with itself—in the guise of the malevolent Other. The 'gothic' imagination magnifies the vicissitudes of 'real life' in order to bring it into a sharper and clearer focus." King's The Body is about coming of age, a theme he has returned to several times, for example in Joyland.

King often uses authors as characters, such as Ben Mears in 'Salem's Lot, Jack Torrance in The Shining, adult Bill Denbrough in It and Mike Noonan in Bag of Bones. He has extended this to breaking the fourth wall by including himself as a character in three novels of The Dark Tower. Among other things, this allows King to explore themes of authorship; George Stade writes that Misery "is a parable in chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his audience, which holds him prisoner and dictates what he writes, on pain of death" while The Dark Half "is a parable in chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his creative genius, the vampire within him, the part of him that only awakes to raise Cain when he writes."

Introducing King at the National Book Awards, Walter Mosley said "Stephen King once said that daily life is the frame that makes the picture. His commitment, as I see it, is to celebrate and empower the everyday man and woman as they buy aspirin and cope with cancer. He takes our daily lives and makes them into something heroic. He takes our world, validates our distrust of it and then helps us to see that there's a chance to transcend the muck. He tells us that even if we fail in our struggles, we are still worthy enough to pass on our energies in the survival of humanity." In his acceptance speech for the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, King said:Frank Norris, the author of McTeague, said something like this: "What should I care if they, i.e., the critics, single me out for sneers and laughter? I never truckled, I never lied. I told the truth." And that's always been the bottom line for me. The story and the people in it may be make believe but I need to ask myself over and over if I've told the truth about the way real people would behave in a similar situation... We understand that fiction is a lie to begin with. To ignore the truth inside the lie is to sin against the craft, in general, and one's own work in particular.

Influences

In On Writing, King says "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all: read a lot and write a lot." He emphasizes the importance of good description, which "begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary. I began learning my lessons in this regard by reading Chandler, Hammett, and Ross Macdonald; I gained perhaps even more respect for the power of compact, descriptive language from reading T. S. Eliot (those ragged claws scuttling across the ocean floor; those coffee spoons), and William Carlos Williams (white chickens, red wheelbarrow, the plums that were in the ice box, so sweet and so cold)."

King has called Richard Matheson "the author who influenced me most". Other influences include Ray Bradbury, Joseph Payne Brennan, James M. Cain, Jack Finney, Graham Greene, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, Don Robertson and Thomas Williams. He often pays homage to classic horror stories by retelling them in a modern context. He recalls that while writing 'Salem's Lot, "I decided I wanted to try to use the book partially as a form of literary homage (as Peter Straub had done in Ghost Story, working in the tradition of such 'classical' ghost story writers as Henry James, M. R. James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne). So my novel bears an intentional similarity to Bram Stoker's Dracula, and after a while it began to seem I was playing an interesting—to me, at least—game of literary racquet-ball: 'Salem's Lot itself was the ball and Dracula was the wall I kept hitting it against, watching to see how and where it could bounce, so I could hit it again. As a matter of fact, it took some pretty interesting bounces, and I ascribe this mostly to the fact that, while my ball existed in the twentieth century, the wall was very much a product of the nineteenth." Similarly, King's Revival is a modern riff on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. King dedicated it to "the people who built my house": Shelley, Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, Fritz Leiber, August Derleth, Shirley Jackson, Robert Bloch, Straub and Arthur Machen, "whose short novel The Great God Pan has haunted me all my life".

He provided an appreciation for The Golden Argosy, a collection of short stories featuring Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and others: "I first found The Golden Argosy in a Lisbon Falls (Maine) bargain barn called the Jolly White Elephant, where it was on offer for $2.25. At that time I only had four dollars, and spending over half of it on one book, even a hardcover, was a tough decision. I've never regretted it... The Golden Argosy taught me more about good writing than all the writing classes I've ever taken. It was the best $2.25 I ever spent."

Critical reception

King has been praised for his use of realistic detail. In A Century of Great Suspense Stories, editor Jeffery Deaver wrote that "While there were many good best-selling writers before him, King, more than anybody since John D. MacDonald, brought reality to genre novels. He has often remarked that 'Salem's Lot was 'Peyton Place meets Dracula'. And so it was. The rich characterization, the careful and caring social eye, the interplay of story line and character development announced that writers could take worn themes such as vampirism and make them fresh again. Before King, many popular writers found their efforts to make their books serious blue-penciled by their editors. 'Stuff like that gets in the way of the story,' they were told. Well, it's stuff like that that has made King so popular, and helped free the popular name from the shackles of simple genre writing. He is a master of masters." Daniel Mendelsohn, reviewing Bag of Bones, wrote that "Stephen King is so widely accepted as America's master of paranormal terrors that you can forget his real genius is for the everyday... This is a book about reanimation: the ghosts', of course, but also Mike's, his desire to re-embrace love and work after a long bereavement that King depicts with an eye for the kind of small but moving details that don't typically distinguish blockbuster horror novels."

Many critics argue that King has matured as a writer. In his analysis of post–World War II horror fiction, The Modern Weird Tale (2001), S. T. Joshi devotes a chapter to King's work. Joshi argues that King's best-known works are his worst, describing them as mostly bloated, illogical, maudlin and prone to deus ex machina endings. Despite these criticisms, Joshi argues that since Gerald's Game (1992), King has been tempering the worst of his writing faults, producing books that are leaner, more believable and generally better written.

In 2003, King was honored by the National Book Awards with a lifetime achievement award, the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Some in the literary community expressed disapproval of the award: Richard E. Snyder, the former CEO of Simon & Schuster, described King's work as "non-literature" and critic Harold Bloom denounced the choice: "The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for 'distinguished contribution' to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis."

King acknowledged the controversy in his acceptance speech: "There are some people who have spoken out passionately about giving me this medal. There are some people who think it's an extraordinarily bad idea. There have been some people who have spoken out who think it's an extraordinarily good idea. You know who you are and where you stand and most of you who are here tonight are on my side. I'm glad for that. But I want to say it doesn't matter in a sense which side you were on. The people who speak out, speak out because they are passionate about the book, about the word, about the page and, in that sense, we're all brothers and sisters. Give yourself a hand." Shirley Hazzard, whose novel The Great Fire was that year's National Book Award winner, responded by criticizing King; she later said that she had never read him.

Roger Ebert wrote that "A lot people were outraged when he was honored at the National Book Awards, as if a popular writer couldn't be taken seriously. But after finding that his book On Writing has more useful and observant things to say about the craft than any book since Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, I have gotten over my own snobbery. King has, after all, been responsible for the movies The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Dead Zone, Misery, Apt Pupil, Christine, Hearts in Atlantis, Stand By Me and Carrie... And we must not be ungrateful for Silver Bullet, which I awarded three stars because it was 'either the worst movie made from a Stephen King story, or the funniest', and you know which side of that I'm gonna come down on."

Appraisal by other authors

Cynthia Ozick said that, upon giving a reading with King, "It dawned on me as I listened to him that, never mind all the best sellers and all the stereotypes -- this man is a genuine, true-born writer, and that was a revelation. He is not Tom Clancy. He writes sentences, and he has a literary focus, and his writing is filled with literary history. It's not glib, it's not just contemporary chatter and it's not stupid -- that's a bad way to say that something's smart, but that's what I mean."

Joyce Carol Oates praised King's sense of place: "His fiction is famously saturated with the atmosphere of Maine; much of his mostly vividly imagined work—Salem's Lot, Dolores Claiborne, the elegantly composed story 'The Reach', for instance—is a poetic evocation of that landscape, its history and its inhabitants." Oates included the latter story in the second edition of The Oxford Book of American Short Stories.

Peter Straub compared King favorably to Charles Dickens: "Both are novelists of vast popularity and enormous bibliographies, both are beloved writers with a pronounced taste for the morbid and grotesque, both display a deep interest in the underclass." Straub included King's short story "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French" in the Library of America anthology American Fantastic Tales.

David Foster Wallace assigned Carrie and The Stand while teaching at Illinois State University. Wallace praised King's ear for dialogue: "He's one of the first people to talk about real Americans and how they live, to capture real American dialogue in all its, like, foulmouthed grandeur... He has a deadly ear for the way people speak... Students come to me and a lot of them have been led to believe that there's good stuff and bad stuff, literary books and popular books, stuff that's redemptive and commercial shit—with a sharp line drawn between the two categories. It's good to show them that there's a certain amount of blurring. Surface-wise, King's work is a bit televisual, but there's really a lot going on."

Views and activism

King was raised Methodist, but lost his belief in organized religion while in high school. While not conventionally religious, he says he does believe in God.

King has supported several Democrats in presidential races. In 1984, King endorsed Gary Hart's presidential campaign. During the 2008 presidential election, King endorsed Barack Obama. In 2016, King was one of many writers who signed a letter condemning the candidacy of Donald Trump. In the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, King endorsed Elizabeth Warren's campaign. Warren eventually suspended her campaign, and King later endorsed Joe Biden's campaign in the 2020 general election. In July 2024, he called on Joe Biden to step down from the presidential race. King went on to endorse Kamala Harris.

On April 30, 2012, King published an article in The Daily Beast calling for rich Americans, including himself, to pay more taxes, citing it as "a practical necessity and moral imperative that those who have received much should be obligated to pay ... in the same proportion". King testified in an August 2022 case brought by the U.S. Justice Department to block a $2.2 billion merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster (two of the "Big Five" book publishers). The New York Times credited King's high-profile testimony, which was against his own publisher, with helping to convince presiding judge Florence Y. Pan with ultimately blocking the merger.

In April 2008, King spoke out against HB 1423, a bill pending in the Massachusetts state legislature that would restrict or ban the sale of violent video games to anyone under the age of 18. King argued that such laws allow legislators to ignore the economic divide between the rich and poor and the easy availability of guns, which he believed were the actual causes of violence. In 2013 King published an essay titled Guns, which discusses the gun debate in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. King called for gun owners to support a ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons.

In June 2018, King called for the release of the Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who was jailed in Russia. In July 2022, Stephen King appeared in a video call with the Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus who played the role of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In the call, King said "You can always find things about people to pull them down. Washington and Jefferson were slave owners—that doesn't mean they didn't do many good things to the United States of America. There are always people who have flaws, we are humans. On the whole, I think Bandera is a great man, and you're a great man, and Viva Ukraine!" However, King later realized that he was pranked and apologized on Twitter, noting that he was not the only victim and "other victims who fell for these guys include J. K. Rowling, Prince Harry, and Justin Trudeau".

Personal life

After meeting her while studying at the University of Maine, King married Tabitha Spruce on January 2, 1971. She is also a novelist and philanthropist. She has been supportive of him throughout his career, even rescuing his early manuscript of Carrie from the trash when he doubted himself. They own and divide their time between three houses: one in Bangor, Maine, one in Lovell, Maine, and for the winter a waterfront mansion located off the Gulf of Mexico in Sarasota, Florida. King's home in Bangor has been described as an unofficial tourist attraction, and as of 2019, the couple plan to convert it into a facility housing his archives and a writers' retreat.

The Kings have three children—two sons and a daughter, Naomi (born June 1, 1970), who is a Unitarian Universalist Church minister in Plantation, Florida, with her partner, Thandeka. Both of King's sons are also professional authors: Owen King (born February 21, 1977) published his first collection of stories, We're All in This Together: A Novella and Stories, in 2005. Joseph Hillström King (born June 4, 1972), who writes as Joe Hill, published his first collection of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts, in 2005.

King is a longtime fan of baseball, particularly the Boston Red Sox. In 1990, King published an essay about Owen's Little League team in The New Yorker. King and Stewart O'Nan coauthored Faithful, a chronicle of their correspondence about the historic 2004 Boston Red Sox season which culminated in the Sox winning the 2004 World Series. The game features in King's novellas The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) and Blockade Billy (2010).

Music, particularly rock, plays a role in much of King's work. On the BBC program Desert Island Discs, King's number one choice was Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row". On another BBC program, Paperback Writers, he made new selections, among them AC/DC's "Stiff Upper Lip", Danny & the Juniors's "At the Hop" and Creedence Clearwater Revival's "It Came Out of the Sky". He played guitar for the Rock Bottom Remainders, a charity supergroup whose members included Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, Dave Barry, Scott Turow, James McBride, Mitch Albom, Roy Blount, Jr., Matt Groening, Greg Iles, Kathi Kamen Goldmark and other authors. They released an album, Stranger Than Fiction (1998), under Goldmark's label, Don't Quit Your Day Job Records. King and his band-mates coauthored Midlife Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America With Three Chords and an Attitude (1994) and the e-book Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All (2013). King's favorite books about music are Greil Marcus's Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces and Chris Willman's Rednecks and Bluenecks.

King and his wife own the Zone Corporation, a radio station group established in 1983 to acquire WACZ in Bangor, which was renamed WZON. Two additional stations, WKIT-FM and WNSW in Brewer, were added in 1995; WNSW was quickly closed down. A third station, WDME-FM in Dover-Foxcroft (later renamed WZLO), was acquired in 2001. In December 2024, King announced that the stations would shut down at the end of the year. He cited his advancing age and financial losses from the stations as reasons for the closure. Ahead of the planned closure, King reached a deal to sell WKIT to two Bangor businessmen; WZON and WZLO remain slated for closure.

King remains a voracious reader. In J. Peder Zane's The Top Ten: Authors Pick Their Favorite Books, King chose The Golden Argosy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Satanic Verses, McTeague, Lord of the Flies, Bleak House, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Raj Quartet, Light in August and Blood Meridian. In 2022, he provided another list of ten favorite books; Lord of the Flies, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Blood Meridian remained, and he added Ship of Fools, The Orphan Master's Son, Invisible Man, Watership Down, The Hair of Harold Roux, American Pastoral and The Lord of the Rings. He added, "Although Anthony Powell's novels should probably be on here, especially the sublimely titled Casanova's Chinese Restaurant and Books Do Furnish a Room. And Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. And at least six novels by Patricia Highsmith. And what about Patrick O'Brian? See how hard this is to do?"

When asked about his reading habits, King replied, "I'm sort of an omnivore, apt to go from the latest John Sandford to D. H. Lawrence to Cormac McCarthy." When asked what books we'd be surprised to find on his shelves, he answered "Poetry, maybe? I love Anne Sexton, Richard Wilbur, W. B. Yeats. The poetry I come back to again and again are the narrative poems of Stephen Dobyns." When asked which novel he comes back to, he named Thomas Williams's The Hair of Harold Roux. When asked who his favorite novelist is, he said "Probably Don Robertson, author of Paradise Falls, The Ideal, Genuine Man and the marvelously titled Miss Margaret Ridpath and the Dismantling of the Universe. What I appreciate most in novels and novelists is generosity, a complete baring of the heart and mind, and Robertson always did that. He also wrote the best single line I've ever read in a novel: Of a funeral he wrote, 'There were that day, o Lord, squadrons of birds.'"

Car accident and aftermath

On June 19, 1999, at about 4:30 pm, King was walking on the shoulder of Maine State Route 5, in Lovell, Maine. Driver Bryan Edwin Smith, distracted by an unrestrained dog moving in the back of his minivan, struck King, who landed in a depression in the ground about 14 feet (four meters) from the pavement of Route 5. Early reports at the time from Oxford County Sheriff deputy Matt Baker claimed King was hit from behind, and some witnesses said the driver was not speeding, reckless, or drinking.

Smith was later arrested and charged with driving to endanger and aggravated assault. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of driving to endanger and was sentenced to six months in county jail (suspended) and had his driving license suspended for a year. In his book On Writing, King states he was heading north, walking against the traffic. Shortly before the crash took place, a woman in a car, also northbound, passed King first followed by a light blue Dodge van. The van was looping from one side of the road to the other, and the woman told her passenger she hoped "that guy in the van doesn't hit him".

King was conscious enough to give the deputy phone numbers to contact his family but was in considerable pain. He was transported to Northern Cumberland Hospital in Bridgton and then flown by air ambulance to Central Maine Medical Center (CMMC) in Lewiston. His injuries—a collapsed right lung, multiple fractures of his right leg, scalp laceration and a broken hip—kept him at CMMC until July 9. His leg bones were so shattered that doctors initially considered amputating his leg but stabilized the bones in the leg with an external fixator. After five operations in 10 days and physical therapy, King resumed work on On Writing in July, though his hip was still shattered and he could sit for only about 40 minutes before the pain became unbearable.

King's wife got in touch with his lawyer to purchase Smith's van, reportedly to prevent it from appearing on eBay. He recalls: "When I was in the hospital, mostly unconscious, my wife got a lawyer who's just a friend of the family... And she got in touch with him and said, buy it so that somebody else doesn't buy it and decide to break it up and sell it on eBay, on the Internet. And so he did. And for about six months, I did have these, sort of, fantasies of smashing the van up. But my wife—I don't always listen to her the first time, but sooner or later, she usually gets through. And what she says makes more sense than what I had planned. And her thought was that the best thing to do would be to very quietly remove it from this plane of existence, which is what we did."

Stephen King

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Stephen King across IJR

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Early life and education

Career

Beginnings

1970s: Carrie to The Dead Zone

1980s: Different Seasons to The Dark Half

1990s: Four Past Midnight to Hearts in Atlantis

2000s: On Writing to Under the Dome

2010s: Full Dark, No Stars to The Institute

2020s: If It Bleeds to present

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The Dark Tower

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🎬 Filmography

Stephen King across IJR

Notable quotes