Early life
When King was two years old, his father, Donald Edwin King, deserted his family. His mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury, raised King and his adopted older brother David by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. The family moved to Ruth's home town of Durham, Maine but also spent brief periods in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Stratford, Connecticut.As a child, King witnessed a gruesome accident - one of his friends was caught on a railway track and struck by a train It has been suggested that this could have inspired King's dark, disturbing creations, but King himself dismisses the idea.
King attended Durham Elementary School and Lisbon Falls High School and began writing at a young age. When in school, he wrote stories based on movies he had seen recently and sold them to his friends. This was not popular among his teachers, and he was forced to return his profits when this was discovered. The stories were copied using a mimeo machine that his brother David used to copy a newspaper, Dave's Rag, which he published himself. Dave's Rag was about local events, and King would often contribute. As a young boy, King was an avid reader of EC's horror comics including Tales from the Crypt, which provided the genesis for his love of horror. His screenplay for Creepshow would later play tribute to the comics.
His first published story was "In a Half-World of Terror" (retitled from "I Was a Teen-Age Grave-robber"), published in a horror fanzine issued by Mike Garrett of Birmingham, Alabama.
From 1966 to 1971, King studied English at the University of Maine at Orono. At the university, he wrote a column titled "King's Garbage Truck" in the student newspaper, the Maine Campus. He also met Tabitha Spruce; they married in 1971. King took on odd jobs to pay for his studies, including one at an industrial laundry. He used the experience to write the short story "The Mangler" and the novelette "Roadwork"(as Richard Bachman). The campus period in his life is readily evident in the second part of Hearts in Atlantis.After finishing his university studies with a Bachelor of Arts in English and obtaining a certificate to teach high school, King taught English at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. During this time, he and his family lived in a trailer. He wrote short stories (most were published in men's magazines) to help make ends meet. As told in the introduction in Carrie, if one of his kids got a cold, Tabitha would joke, "Come on, Steve, think of a monster." King also developed a drinking problem which stayed with him for over a decade.
Becoming famous
During this period, King began a number of novels. One of his first ideas was of a young girl with psychic powers, but he grew discouraged and threw it into the trash. Tabitha later rescued it and encouraged him to finish it.[3] After completing the novel, he titled it Carrie, sent it to Doubleday, and more or less forgot about it. Later, he received an offer to buy it with a $2,500 advance (not a large advance for a novel, even at that time). Shortly after, the value of Carrie was realized with the paperback rights being sold for $400,000 (with $200,000 of it going to the publisher). Soon following its release, his mother died of uterine cancer. His Aunt Emrine read the novel to her before she died.In On Writing, King admits that at this time he was consistently drunk and was an alcoholic for well over a decade. He even admits that he was intoxicated while delivering the eulogy at his mother’s funeral. "I think I did a pretty good job, considering how drunk I was at the time." He states that he had based The Shining alcoholic father on himself, though he did not admit it (even to himself) for several years.
Shortly after the publication of The Tommyknockers, King's family and friends finally intervened, dumping his trash on the rug in front of him to show him the evidence of his own addictions.[citation needed] As King related in his memoir, he sought help and quit all forms of drugs and alcohol in the late 1980s, and has remained sober since.King will not sign photographs. He feels that is something that should be reserved for movie stars. However, some of his fans have received autographed photos simply by asking.King spends winter seasons in an oceanfront mansion located off the Gulf of Mexico in Sarasota, Florida. Their three children, Naomi Rachel, Joseph Hillstrom King (who appeared in the film Creepshow), and Owen Phillip, are grown and living on their own.Both Owen and Joseph are writers; Owen's first collection of stories, We're All in This Together: A Novella and Stories was published in 2005. The first collection of stories by Joe Hill (Joseph's pen name), 20th Century Ghosts, was published in 2005 by PS Publishing in a very limited edition, winning the Crawford Award for best new fantasy writer, together with the Bram Stoker Award and the British Fantasy Award for Best Fiction Collection. Tom Pabst has been hired to adapt Hill's upcoming novel, Heart-Shaped Box, for a 2007 Warner Bros release.
King's daughter Naomi is a Reverend in the Unitarian Universalist Church in Utica, New York, where she lives with her partner.
Baseball
Stephen King is a lifelong fan of the Boston Red Sox and is frequently found at both home and away baseball games.King helped coach his son Owen's Bangor West team to the Maine Little League Championship in 1989. He recounts this experience in the New Yorker essay "Head Down", which also appears in the collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes. King has called "Head Down" his best piece of nonfiction writing.n 1992 King and his wife Tabitha's donations allowed the opening of Mansfield Stadium, a Little League ballpark in Bangor, Maine.In 1999, King wrote The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, which involved former Red Sox pitcher Tom Gordon as an imaginary companion to the protagonist. King recently co-wrote a book titled Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season with Stewart O'Nan, recounting the authors' roller coaster reaction to the Red Sox's 2004 season, a season culminating in the Sox winning the 2004 American League Championship Series and World Series.In the 2005 film Fever Pitch, about an obsessive Boston Red Sox fan, King tosses out the first pitch of the Sox's opening day game.
Philanthropy
Since becoming commercially successful, King and his wife, Tabitha, have donated considerable sums of money to various causes around their home state of Maine.The Kings' timely donation of funds to the University of Maine Swim Team in the early nineties saved the program from being eliminated from the school's athletics department; various donations to local YMCA and YWCA programs over the years have allowed both organizations to make much-needed renovations and improvements that would have been impossible otherwise. Additionally, King annually sponsors a number of scholarships for both high school and college students.The Kings do not desire recognition for their bankrolling of Bangor-area facilities: The Shawn T. Mansfield Stadium was named for the son of a prominent local little league coach who was a victim of cerebral palsy, while the Beth Pancoe Aquatic Park memorializes an outstanding area swimmer who succumbed to a long battle with cancer.