It’s the master of horror’s birthday today!

Congratulations to the master of horror!
Stephen Edwin King. Stephen Edwin King) is an American writer working in a variety of genres, including horror, thriller, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, drama, born September 21, 1947 in Portland, Maine, USA. Stephen King published some of his works under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Richard Bachman). Now he is one of the most famous and popular novelists of our time. His works are periodically filmed. Outstanding film adaptations of Stephen King are the films “The Shining”, “The Green Mile”, “The Shawshank Redemption”, “Misery”, “Dolores Claiborne”.

Stephen King. Dedicated to my birthday!
World-famous horror novelist Stephen Edwin King appeared on September 21, 1947 at Maine Community Hospital in Portland, Maine. Baby Stevie was the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsberry King (actually, King’s father’s real name was Spansky, but he changed it to a more euphonious one – King). Stephen’s appearance was an unexpected surprise, since Ruth claimed that she could not have children (two-year-old David was the adopted son of the Kings) and further inflamed the not very favorable situation in the family. Two years after such a significant event, Stephen’s father, a retired merchant navy captain, left the house for cigarettes and… never returned.

Left alone with a mountain of unpaid bills, as well as two-year-old Stephen and four-year-old David, Ruth King did not give up. Being a cheerful and active woman by nature, she was essentially a vivid embodiment of the feminist movement, albeit not of her own free will. She had to support her two growing sons on her own, working either in the laundry or in the bakery. Of course, she was supported by numerous relatives – the King family often visited one or the other of Ruth’s sisters. Stephen spent part of his childhood in Fort Wayne, Indiana (where King’s father’s parents lived) and Stratford, Connecticut (where his Aunt Lois lived). Stephen and his family also frequently visited Malden, Massachusetts and Pownal, Maine, where Ruth’s sisters lived.

When Stephen was eleven, the King family moved back to Maine, to the town of Durham. The reason for the move to Durham was the poor condition of King’s maternal grandparents – they needed to be looked after. For this purpose it was decided to invite Ruth. Arriving in Durham, Ruth, Stephen and David moved into a house owned by Stephen’s aunt Etheline and her husband Oren. Relatives provided Ruth with financial support, which, however, was almost only enough for food (for example, clothes for Stephen and David were also sent by relatives). After the death of her parents, Ruth King remained in Durham, working as a housekeeper in an institution for the mentally retarded in New Gloucester. She lived in the same house until her death from uterine cancer. Later, King repeatedly used memories of this period in his books. In the story "Corpse" he talks about his friend Chris Chesley. In the story "Grandma" he actually places his family at the epicenter of the development of mystical events. Scattered throughout the novel It, which tells the story of misfit children, are pieces of King’s own childhood. The story "The End of All This Nasty" uses the image of his older brother David Victor King – an inexhaustible generator of stunning ideas and mischief.

The beginning of the journey
King began writing at the age of seven, after he discovered a box filled with science fiction and horror stories in the attic of his aunt’s house. In January 1959, Stephen and his brother David decided to publish their own newspaper, called Dave’s Mustard Plaster. The newspaper mainly covered local Durham events, but also included sporting news, weather forecasts, recipes, humor and a "continued" story written by Stephen. At the dawn of its existence, “Gorchichnik” was created on a mimeograph, then on an old rotaprint. The newspaper was distributed mainly to relatives and neighbors at a price of five cents per issue.

In 1963, together with his best friend from school, Chris Chesley, Stephen published a collection of eighteen short stories called People, Places and Things – Volume I. A year later, the story “Invasion from the Stars” was published on an old rotaprint, which sold several dozen copies to friends and acquaintances. King wrote his first truly published story, “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber,” in 1965. The story was published in Comics Review and contained approximately six thousand words.

By the time he graduated from high school, Stephen had also gained some experience as a journalist, ranging from the amateur "Dave the Mustard" and the school newspaper "The Drum" to a position as a sports reporter for the Lisbon Weekly Enterprise. Therefore, there were no problems with choosing a path in life – the craft of writing called and beckoned!

While in his senior year, Stephen is hesitant about whether to volunteer in Vietnam, where America has been at war for two years (in order to gather material for a future book), or to go to university. King’s mother insisted that her son receive a higher education. “Steven, don’t be an idiot,” she said. – “With your eyes, you will be the first to be shot.”. You can’t write anything to the dead.”. As a result, Stephen applies to universities, writes a student loan application, and also works part-time at a textile factory to earn extra money for his studies.

Students
After graduating from Durham’s Lisbon Falls High School in 1966, Stephen attended the University of Maine at Orono. That same summer, King began working on a novel he called Deal with It, about schoolchildren who are holed up in a classroom and unsuccessfully try to fend off an attack by the National Guard. During his freshman year, King also completed his first full-length novel, The Long Walk. He sent the novel to Bennett/Random House, but was rejected, as a result of which he abandoned work on novels for some time.

While studying at the university, Stephen leads an active social life – he becomes a member of the Student Senate and writes a weekly column in the Maine Campus student newspaper. Having become a student, Stephen begins to support the anti-war movement on campus. here, considering the Vietnam War to be unconstitutional. Stephen King later uses his memories of student life and anti-war sentiments in his novel Hearts in Atlantis.

In the summer of 1969, senior student Stephen King gets a job in the library of the University of Maine; soon, in the company of students from the library, Stephen meets a girl named Tabitha Spruce, who was a junior at the time. During the first meeting, Stephen mistakes her for the city girlfriend of one of his friends. However, that same fall he meets her again at a poetry seminar. The seminar was held in an atmosphere of equality between teachers and students. The participants read out their works, and then a discussion began. After listening to Tabitha’s poems, King realizes that he is not alone in his attitude towards writing – Tabitha impressed him with her work ethic… as well as with her expressive black dress and silk stockings. A year later, on January 2, 1971, Stephen King and Tabitha Spruce got married, in which they live happily to this day.

Unknown
King graduated from https://casinovillento.uk/mobile-app/ the University with a BA in English in 1970, which qualified him to teach high school English. At the same time, the medical commission found Stephen unfit for military service due to flat feet, high blood pressure and poor eyesight.

It is always difficult for a young specialist to find a job, and Stephen was no exception. At first, the young family lived on Stephen’s earnings in a New Franklin laundromat (which amounted to $1.60 an hour), Tabitha’s student loan, and King’s periodic royalties for publishing his stories in men’s magazines. Tabitha also worked as a second shift waitress at a local Dunkin Donuts. The family’s difficult financial situation was further aggravated by the fact that in three years Stephen managed to become a dad twice – a son, Joe, and a daughter, Naomi, were born. During those difficult times, any additional bill for children’s medications was a serious blow to their family budget.

In the fall of 1971, Stephen gets a job teaching English at Hampden Academy with a salary of six thousand four hundred dollars a year. The Academy was a public school in the town of Hampden, Maine. In the winter of 1973, the King family lives in a trailer in the run-down town of Hermon. While teaching, Stephen persists in writing short stories and working on novels in the evenings and on weekends. Publishing houses and magazines also stubbornly reject his manuscripts. In his mind, Stephen already imagines himself in the image of an elderly teacher, who continues to work on several old manuscripts as a hobby. The family’s financial situation leaves much to be desired, so during the holidays Stephen sometimes works part-time in a laundry in New Franklin. In one of his interviews in recent years, he recalls with a laugh that during that difficult time he even tried his pen in the genre of pornographic stories, but the first experience turned out to be very unsuccessful – he almost died laughing while writing a story about twins having sex in a birdbath. His wife tries herself in the genre of confessional prose, but due to lack of time, the works turn out unfinished and none of them were sold.

Success
The turning point in Stephen’s life came when his wife found three crumpled draft pages of a new novel in the trash and read them. It was Tabitha who insisted that there was something in the idea of ​​a girl with paranormal abilities, hunted by her classmates. King finished the novel and sent it to the Doubleday publishing house, where his friend William Thompson worked. Soon the novel is included in the publishing plan and King is paid an advance of two and a half thousand.

On May 12, 1973, a single phone call changes Stephen King’s life once and for all. Bill Thompson tells him that Doubleday has sold the rights to Carrie to Cygnet Books for four hundred thousand dollars. According to the contract, Stephen King received exactly half of this amount. Stunned by the news, Stephen goes for a walk and, to commemorate the extraordinary event and as a Mother’s Day gift, buys Tabitha a hair dryer. The fabulous fee allowed him to leave his job as an English teacher and devote himself entirely to his favorite activity – writing.

You shouldn’t think that after her husband’s success, Tabitha King is leading the lifestyle of a housewife. She has seven books to her credit, ranging from the horror story It’s Small World to the novel Survivor, a dark tale of the misfortunes of a college student and her hockey goalie friend. However, Tabitha is still quite far from her husband’s fame.

In the late summer of 1973, the King family moved to southern Maine due to his mother’s deteriorating health (during an examination after surgery to remove varicose veins, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer). King rents a summer house on Sebago Lake and during the winter of 1973/74 works on another novel, tentatively titled “The Second Coming,” in a small room in the garage (later the novel was published under the title “Salem’s Fate”). That same winter, in February, his mother dies. Stephen finds it difficult to bear the death of such a close and beloved person. The death of his mother leaves an unforgettable wound in his soul – he currently regularly donates to the American Cancer Center.

In the spring of 1974, Carrie was published; in the fall of the same year, King moved to Boulder, Colorado. Here Stephen is working on his novel The Shining, set in the Boulder area. The idea for the novel comes to him one weekend, when Stephen and his wife decide to take a break from their children and stay in room 217 of the Sanley Hotel in Estes Park. The gloomy atmosphere of the issue gave King a number of brilliant ideas, which he successfully applies in his new work. Having finished the novel, King returned to Maine in the summer of 1975, where he purchased a house in the lakes region of western Maine. Here King completes his apocalyptic novel The Stand, part of which he also transfers to the familiar Boulder. During the same period of time, he began work on the novel “The Dead Zone,” which was published under the auspices of a new publishing house, New American Library. The main reason for the break with Doubleday was financial circumstances.

Let’s return to "The Shining". In this haunting novel, King tells the story of a teacher who had a drinking problem. Stephen was staring at the water – over the ten-year period that had passed since 1974, he not only actually became an alcoholic, but also added a serious passion for drugs to alcoholism. He openly talks about this period in his largely autobiographical book “How to Write Books.”. For example, King practically does not remember how the novel “Cujo” was created, published in 1981. The novel "Tommyknockers" was written under various drugs. During this time, King was drinking sixteen-ounce cans a night. It even got to the point where he couldn’t sleep peacefully as long as there was at least one undrank can of beer left in the refrigerator. Chuck Verrill, King’s editor at Viking, remembers meeting with King in 1985 to discuss his novel It. King was in New York on business related to the completion of the film "Top Overdrive". Chuck noted that Steven was constantly taking some kind of pills and was very tense, although he perceived others quite adequately.

Paradoxically, it was during the period from 1974 to 1987 that Stephen King created his most vivid and brutal works, including the novels “The Shining”, “The Dead Zone”, “Ignite with a Glance”, “Cujo”, “The Running Man”, “Pet Sematary”, “Christine”, “The Talisman”, “The Thinner”, “It”, “The Tommyknockers” and “The Dark Tower II: Extraction” three”, as well as the stories “The Corpse”, “Apt Student”, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”.

The end to the passion for alcohol and drugs was put only in 1987 by Stephen’s wife Tabitha and (strangely enough) Annie Wilkes, the crazy nurse from the novel “Misery”. Stephen decided that he had had enough of being a hostage to Annie, who for him personified cocaine and alcohol. In addition, he truly loved his children and his wife, who in the form of an ultimatum demanded that he stop the process of self-destruction. Since then, King’s only alcoholic drink has been Pepsi.

Perhaps King’s problems are the meaning of the endless moves that their family endured in the seventies. In 1977, the Kings went to England for three months, after returning they bought a new house in Central Lowwell. After living there for one summer, they moved to the town of Orrington, located near Bangor, one of the largest cities in Maine, where King teaches a course in creative writing at his home university.

In the spring of 1979, the Kings return to their home in Central Lovell, which they decide to make into a summer home after purchasing a second home in Bangor in 1980. Since their children became adults, the Kings have spent the winter in Florida and most of the rest of the year in Maine, either in Bangor or Lovewell.

In the late 70s, King decided to publish his early novels “Deal with It” and “The Long Walk,” which he wrote during his first year at university. Novels were written before Carrie, but, unfortunately, could not be published for a long time. Now King decided to publish his books under a pseudonym, taking advantage of the opportunities that had opened up to him and neglecting the advice of publishers who warned him against such a step. As a result, the novel "Deal With It" was renamed "Rage" and published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It’s finished – a new author has been born!

Bachman managed to write five more books and even became a cult writer. For quite a long period, his true identity was hidden by everyone who knew the truth. However, you can’t hide a pig in a poke and, several years later, an inquisitive bookstore clerk named Steve Brown found the presence of the name Stephen King on one of Bachman’s copyright forms suspicious. After conducting his own investigation, Mr. Brown realized that the books by King and Bachman were written by the same author! However, King took his exposure quite good-naturedly and agreed to give an interview to Brown. He thought it was a very funny situation when the truth was discovered by an unknown clerk from Washington, and not by the New York Times or some professional sensation hunter.

King’s novels have been filmed many times (starting with the film adaptation of Carrie in 1976), but very often the director’s vision did not coincide with King’s vision. A striking example of such a divergence of views is the famous painting “The Shining” by Stanley Kubrick (1980). King did not like Kubrick’s interpretation of the events of the novel (in 1997, he even produced a new version of The Shining). Therefore, in 1985, Stephen King tried himself in a new role – director and screenwriter. The film "Maximum Acceleration", based on the story "Trucks", tells the story of another Apocalypse, expressed in a riot of cars, but, alas, did not become a discovery for viewers.

In 1989, Stephen King signed a contract with Viking Publishing, under which he received $35 million for his next four books. However, in 1997, King terminated his contract with Viking, as he intended to receive $17 million for his new book, Bag of Bones. He soon struck a deal with the renowned publisher Simon & Schuster, who paid him $8 million in advance for the 1,000-page work, in addition to 50 percent of the proceeds from sales of the book, as well as sales of a forthcoming collection of short stories and a book on writing.

Accident
In 1999, King becomes a grandfather – his son Joe and his wife Leonora have a son, Ethan.
Three months after this joyful event, on June 19, 1999, King went out for his daily four-hour walk. In a good mood after a visit to their home by his son and his family, King walked along the side of the highway towards traffic, climbing a rather steep hill. He was just in a place where it was not visible that he was coming towards. And coming towards him was a light blue Dodge Caravan van, driven by Brian Smith, who was vacationing nearby at a camp with friends and went for groceries. Unfortunately, at the very moment when the van crested the hill, Mr. Smith was not looking at the road, but was shouting at his Rottweiler named Bullet, who decided to sniff the package of meat. Since little attention was paid to actually driving the car, the van was not driving on the road, but along the side of the road – exactly on the same side of the road that Stephen was walking along. According to King, he had three quarters of a second after the car appeared in order to avoid a collision. Naturally, he failed to do this… Brian Smith later told his friends that he thought he had hit a small deer until he saw bloody glasses on the seat next to him. Stephen King was rushed to North Cumberland Medical Center, but after assessing the extent of the injuries, local doctors decide to transport King to Maine Medical Center in Lewiston by helicopter.

The court sentenced Smith to six months’ probation in county jail and suspended his license for one year. Stephen King "acquired" a right leg broken in nine places, four broken ribs, a damaged lung, a spine cracked in eight places and a completely torn right collarbone. Steven’s head lacerations required about thirty stitches. Stephen was discharged from the hospital only after three weeks, after five weeks he again begins to write in order to numb the pain. The consequences of this accident continued to affect King’s well-being for a long time – for example, in the fall of 2003, King was forced to spend 25 days in the hospital to treat double pneumonia; doctors agreed that Stephen’s lungs were weakened by the mentioned accident.

A short time after the accident, Stephen King’s representative Warren Silver purchased the van that hit King from Brian Smith for fifteen hundred dollars in cash. A little later, King gave an interview to the Bridgeton News newspaper in which he admitted that he purchased the van in order to put it under pressure. Stephen King was very unhappy with Smith’s lenient punishment.

A year later, Brian Edwin Smith was found dead in his bed in his mobile home. After not being seen for three days, Smith’s brother called the police for help. The police did not find any injuries on his body, so an autopsy was not carried out, although it was planned. According to police, Smith was being treated for a number of illnesses and one of them may have caused his death. Thus justice was restored in this story.

Completing the journey
By 2002, King had published about forty novels and several collections of short stories. It is becoming more and more difficult to find new ideas, and in September 2002, Stephen King made a statement in the American media about his retirement from the literary field after completing work on his cult epic “The Dark Tower”. Stephen claimed that he did not want to turn into a graphomaniac, because, to date, he had said everything he wanted to say. At the same time, he did not deny that if he had a worthwhile idea, he would definitely write a book. As one would expect, the “abstinence” from creativity did not last long – immediately after the release of the final novel of the Dark Tower series, Stephen published the documentary book “Fan”, written in co-authorship with Stuart O’Nan, and then the novels “Mobile”, “Lisey’s Story”, “Blaze”, “Duma-Key”. New works come from his pen with enviable consistency to this day.

On November 19, 2003, Stephen King was awarded one of the highest literary awards in the United States – the Medal for Outstanding Contribution to American Literature. A number of famous American writers condemned such a move on the part of the National Book Foundation, which awards the prize, because before King, this award was received by such grandees of American literature as John Updike, Arthur Miller, Philip Roth. Receiving such an award means actually conferring the status of a living classic of American literature. The New York Times sarcastically noted that the medal was awarded to King under pressure from a number of publishers who have recently sponsored the National Book Foundation. For his part, in his speech at the medal ceremony, Stephen King stood up for himself, as well as for numerous best-selling authors. Stephen King calls on the National Book Foundation to pay more attention to authors like him, John Grisham and Tom Clancy. At the same time, he noted that, once, in order to get to the National Book Award ceremony, he and John Grisham had to buy tickets, since they had no other way to get to the ceremony.