Stephen King

For other people named Stephen King, see Stephen King (disambiguation).

sick Bastard
Stephen King.
Born	(1947-09-21) September 21, 1947 Portland, Maine, USA
Died	now later
Pen name	Richard Bachman John Swithen
Occupation	necrophelia
Genre	Horror fiction Fantasy Science fiction
Signature
File:SKingSignature.JPG
Website
www.stephenking.com

Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author best known for his bestselling horror novels. King was the 2003 recipient of The National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

King evinces a thorough knowledge of the horror genre, as shown in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, which chronicles several decades of notable works in both literature and cinema. He has also written stories outside the horror genre, including the novella collection Different Seasons, The Green Mile, The Eyes of the Dragon, The Stand, Hearts in Atlantis and his magnum opus The Dark Tower series. In the past, Stephen King has written under the pen names Richard Bachman and (once) John Swithen.

Biography

Early life

When King was three 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 railroad and struck by a train. It has been suggested that this could have been the inspiration for King's dark, disturbing creations, though King himself dismisses the idea.

King attended Durham Elementary School and Lisbon Falls High School.

King has been writing since an early 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 self-published. 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, which provided the genesis for his love of horror. He loved reading Tales from the Crypt.

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

King's home

During this period, King began a number of novels. One of his first ideas was of a young girl with psychic powers. However, he grew discouraged, and threw it into the trash. Tabitha later rescued it and encouraged him to finish it. 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 that he 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." (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft) He states that he had based the alcoholic father in The Shining 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. 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 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. This experience is recounted 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.

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. This work recounts 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 1992, Mansfield Stadium, a Little League ballpark (which also hosts High School and Senior League games) opened in Bangor, Maine. This facility was made possible through the efforts and donations of King and his wife Tabitha.

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.

Car accident

In the summer of 1999, King was in the middle of writing On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. At the time, he had finished the memoir section and had abandoned the book for nearly eighteen months, unsure of how to proceed or whether to bother. King reports that it was the first book that he'd abandoned since writing The Stand decades earlier. He had just decided to continue the book. On June 17, he had written up a list of questions he was frequently asked about writing, as well as some that he wished he would be asked about; on June 18, he had written four pages of the section on writing.

On June 19, at about 4:30 PM, he was walking on the right shoulder of Route 5 in Center Lovell, Maine. Driver Bryan Smith, distracted by an unrestrained Rottweiler named Bullet, moving in the back of his 1985 Dodge Caravan, struck King, who landed in a depression in the ground about 14 feet from the pavement of Route 5.

Oxford County Sheriff's deputy Matt Baker recorded that witnesses said the driver was not speeding or reckless. Baker also reported that King was struck from behind. King's official website, however, states that this was incorrect, and that King was walking facing traffic. In any case, Smith was turned and leaning to the rear of his vehicle trying to restrain his dog, and was not watching the road when he struck King.

King was conscious enough to give the deputy phone numbers to contact his family, but in considerable pain. King also mentioned in an interview that he told a paramedic he knew he was going into shock -and he knew very well what shock was because he wrote about horrible injuries all the time and asked the paramedic if it was as bad as it looked to him. The author was first transported to Northern Cumberland Hospital in Bridgton and then flown by helicopter to Central Maine Hospital in Lewiston. His injuries — a collapsed right lung, multiple fractures of the right leg, scalp laceration, and a broken hip — kept him in Central Maine Medical Center until July 9, almost three weeks later.

Earlier that year King had finished most of From a Buick 8, a novel in which one of the characters dies in an automobile accident. Of the eerie similarities, King says that he tries "not to make too much of it." Certainly car accidents and their horrors had figured into King's work before. His 1987 novel Misery also concerned a writer who experiences severe injuries in an auto accident, and auto wrecks figure prominently in The Dead Zone and Thinner. Christine is even a complete novel where a 1958 Plymouth Fury runs down its enemies. Despite persistent rumours to the contrary, Christine was not in fact based on a car that King himself had formerly owned. King wrote a segment for the movie Creepshow 2 in which a driver is followed by the bloodied hitchhiker she ran down. 1994's Insomnia has a main character struck dead by a car, and central to the plot in Pet Sematary is the scene in which the young son of the protagonist is struck and killed by a tractor-trailer. Following the accident, King wrote Dreamcatcher, in which a central character suffers injuries similar to King's own after being struck by a car.

The series premiere of Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital involved the main character, a painter out for a morning run, being hit by a pickup truck, and was also inspired by the accident. In fact the scene was depicted in a way remarkably similar to that in which he described his real accident occurring, the only exception being that the driver in the show was driving drunk in addition to trying to restrain his dog.

After five operations in ten days and physical therapy, King resumed work on On Writing in July, though his hip was still shattered and he could only sit for about forty minutes before the pain became intolerable.

King's lawyer and two others purchased Smith's van for $1,500, reportedly to avoid it appearing on eBay. The van was later crushed at a junkyard, though King mentioned during an interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross, wanted to destroy the vehicle with a sledgehammer. Smith, a disabled construction worker, died of an overdose of pain medication on September 21, 2000 (King's birthday) at the age of 43.

King incorporated his accident into the final novel of his Dark Tower series, in which the hero Roland Deschain and his ka-tet prevent a fictionalized version of King from being fatally injured by the van. In the story, Roland hypnotized both King and Bryan Smith in order to make them forget his appearance.

File:The Colorado Kid.jpg

Paperback original first edition of The Colorado Kid

Recent years

In 2002, King announced he would stop writing, apparently motivated in part by frustration with his injuries, which had made sitting uncomfortable, and reduced his stamina.

"I'm writing but I'm writing at a much slower pace than previously and I think that if I come up with something really, really good, I would be perfectly willing to publish it because that still feels like the final act of the creative process, publishing it so people can read it and you can get feedback and people can talk about it with each other and with you, the writer, but the force of my invention has slowed down a lot over the years and that's as it should be. I'm not a kid of 25 anymore and I'm not a young middle-aged man of 35 anymore — I'm 55 years old and I have grandchildren, two new puppies to house-train and I have a lot of things to do besides writing and that in and of itself is a wonderful thing but writing is still a big, important part of my life and of everyday."

Since 2003, King has provided his take on pop culture in a column appearing on the back page of Entertainment Weekly, usually every third week. The column is called "The Pop Of King", a reference to "The King of Pop", Michael Jackson.

In October 2005, King signed a deal with Marvel Comics, to publish a seven-issue, miniseries spinoff of The Dark Tower series called The Gunslinger Born. The series, which focuses on a young Roland Deschain, is plotted by Robin Furth, dialogued by Peter David, and illustrated by Eisner Award-winning artist Jae Lee. The first issue was published on February 7, 2007, and because of its connection with King, David, Lee, and Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada appeared at a midnight signing at a Times Square, New York comic book store to promote it. The work had sold over 200,000 copies by March 2007.

In June 2006, King appeared on the first installment of Amazon Fishbowl, a live web-program hosted by Bill Maher.

King, a long time supporter of small publishing, has recently allowed the publication of two past novels in limited edition form. The Green Mile and Colorado Kid will receive special treatment from two small publishing houses. Both books will be produced and be signed by both King and the artist contributing work to the book. Half of King's published work has been re-published in limited (signed) edition format.

On February 14, 2007, Joblo.com announced that plans were underway for Lost creator J. J. Abrams to do an adaptation of King's epic Dark Tower series.

King will soon publish the novel Blaze, which was written in the early '70s, under his long-time pseudonym Richard Bachman. He is also finishing the novel Duma Key and writing a play with John Mellencamp titled Ghost Brothers Of Darkland County.

On April 20, 2007, Entertainment Weekly asked King if he felt there was a correlation between Seung-Hui Cho's writing and the Virginia Tech massacre. King stated, "Certainly in this sensitized day and age, my own college writing would have raised red flags, and I'm certain someone would have tabbed me as mentally ill because of them" and "Cho doesn't strike me as in the least creative, however. Dude was crazy. Dude was, in the memorable phrasing of Nikki Giovanni, 'just mean.' Essentially there's no story here, except for a paranoid a--hole who went DEFCON-1." King felt that Cho's work had issues because of its themes and the lack of writing ability and a meaningful story .

Richard Bachman

Main article: Richard Bachman

In the late 1970s-early 1980s, after becoming a popular horror writer, King published a handful of novels — Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Road Work (1981), The Running Man (1982), and Thinner (1984) — under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The idea behind this was largely an experiment to measure for himself whether or not he could replicate his own success again, and allay at least part of the notion inside his own head that popularity might all be just an accident of fate.

"But there's another part that suggests it's all a lottery, a real-life game-show not much different from Wheel of Fortune or The New Price Is Right (two of the Bachman books, incidentally, are about game-show-type competitions). It is for some reason depressing to think it was all -- or even mostly -- an accident. So maybe you try to find out if you could do it again."

The Bachman novels contained hints to the author's actual identity that were picked up on by fans, leading to King's admission of authorship in 1985. King dedicated his 1989 book The Dark Half about a pseudonym turning on a writer to "the deceased Richard Bachman", and in 1996, when the Stephen King novel Desperation was released, the companion novel The Regulators carried the Bachman byline.

In 2006, during a London UK press conference, King revealed that he had discovered another Bachman novel, titled Blaze. It will be published on June 12 2007 in the UK and US.

Writing style

In King's nonfiction book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King discusses his writing style at great length and depth. King believes that, generally speaking, good stories cannot be called consciously and should not be plotted out beforehand, but are better served by focusing on a single "seed" of a story and letting the story grow itself from there. King often begins a story with no idea how the story will end. He mentions in the Dark Tower series that, halfway through its lengthy, nearly 30-year writing period, King received a letter from a woman with cancer who asked how the book would end, because she was unlikely to live long enough to read it. He stated that he didn't know. King believes strongly in this style, stating that his best writing comes from freewriting. In On Writing, King stated that he believed stories to exist fully formed, like fossils, and that his role as a writer was to excavate the fossil as well as he could.

He is known for his great eye for detail, for continuity, and for inside references; many stories that may seem unrelated are often linked by secondary characters, fictional towns, or off-hand references to events in previous books. Read as a whole, King's work (which is centered around his Dark Tower series) creates a remarkable history that stretches from present day all the way back to the beginning of time (with a unique cosmogony).

King's books are filled with references to American history and American culture, particularly the darker, more fearful side of these. These references are generally spun into the stories of characters, often explaining their fears. Recurrent references include crime, war (especially the Vietnam War), violence, the supernatural, and racism.

King is also known for his folksy, informal narration, often referring to his fans as "Constant Readers" or "friends and neighbors." This familiar style contrasts with the horrific content of many of his stories.

King has a very simple formula for learning to write well: "Read four hours a day and write four hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can't expect to become a good writer."

King also has a simple definition for talent in writing: "If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented."

Shortly after his accident, King wrote the first draft of the book Dreamcatcher with a notebook and a Waterman fountain pen, which he called "the world's finest word processor."

King's writing style throughout his novels, alternates from future to past, characters, and setting in each chapter leaving a cliffhanger at the end. He then continues this process until the novel is finished.

Critical response

Critical responses to King's works have been mixed.

In his analysis of post-World War II horror fiction, The Modern Weird Tale (2001), critic S. T. Joshi devotes a chapter to King's work. Joshi argues that King's best-known works (his supernatural novels) are his worst, being mostly bloated, illogical, maudlin and prone to deus ex machina endings. Despite these criticisms, Joshi argues that since Gerald's Game (1993), King has been tempering the worst of his writing faults, producing books that are leaner, more believable and generally better written. Joshi also stresses that, despite his flaws, King almost unfailingly writes insightfully about the pains and joys of adolescence, and has produced a few outstanding books, citing two non-supernatural novels - Rage (1977) and The Running Man (1982) - as King's best: in Joshi's estimation, both books are riveting and well-constructed, with believable characters.

In 1996, King won an O. Henry Award for his short story "The Man in the Black Suit." In 2003, when King was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Awards, there was an uproar in the literary community, with literary critic Harold Bloom denouncing the choice:

He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls. That they could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy.

However, in giving the award, the Foundation said, "Stephen King’s writing is securely rooted in the great American tradition that glorifies spirit-of-place and the abiding power of narrative. He crafts stylish, mind-bending page-turners that contain profound moral truths - some beautiful, some harrowing - about our inner lives. This Award commemorates Mr. King’s well-earned place of distinction in the wide world of readers and book lovers of all ages."

Others in the writing community expressed their contempt of the slight towards King. When Richard Snyder, the former CEO of Simon & Schuster, described King's work as "non-literature", Orson Scott Card responded: "Let me assure you that King's work most definitely is literature, because it was written to be published and is read with admiration. What Snyder really means is that it is not the literature preferred by the academic-literary elite."

Influences

King has called Richard Matheson "the author who influenced me most as a writer". Both authors casually integrate characters' thoughts into the third person narration, just one of several parallels between their writing styles. In a current edition of Matheson's The Incredible Shrinking Man, King is quoted: "A horror story if there ever was one...a great adventure story—it is certainly one of that select handful that I have given to people, envying them the experience of the first reading."

King is a fan of H.P. Lovecraft, refers to him several times in Danse Macabre, and has used several of Lovecraft's writing techniques in his own work. Lovecraft's influence shows in King's invention of bizarre, ancient deities, subtle connections among all of his tales, and the integration of fabricated newspaper clippings, trial transcripts and documents as narrative devices. King's invented trio of afflicted New England towns--Jerusalem's Lot, Castle Rock and Derry-- are reminiscent of Lovecraft's Arkham, Dunwich and Innsmouth. King's short story Crouch End is an explicit homage to, and part of, Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos story cycle. Another tribute to Lovecraft is in Kings short story 'Jerusalem's Lot', which opens King's book Night Shift. King differs markedly from Lovecraft in his focus on extensive characterization, and naturalistic dialogue, both notably absent in Lovecraft's writing. In On Writing, King is critical of Lovecraft's dialogue-writing skills, using passages from The Colour Out of Space as particularly poor examples. In From a Buick 8 King, in essence, places a squad of Pennsylvania State Troopers in a Lovecraft story. Although some characters are enamored with the unknown, all of them are threatened by madness when faced with it.

Edgar Allan Poe, one of the fathers to the contemporary literary horror genre, exerts a noticeable influence over King's writing as well. In The Shining, the phrase "And the red death held sway over all" hearkens back to Poe's "And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all" from "The Masque of the Red Death." The short story "Dolan's Cadillac" has a theme almost identical to Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," including a paraphrase of Fortunato's famous plea, "For the love of God, Montresor!" In The Shining, King refers to Poe as "The Great American Hack".

King acknowledges the influence of Bram Stoker, particularly on his novel ’Salem's Lot, which was envisioned as a retelling of Dracula. The short story prequel to Salem's Lot, Jerusalem's Lot, is very reminiscent of both H.P. Lovecraft's work and Stoker's Lair of the White Worm.

King has also openly declared his admiration for another, far less prolific author: Shirley Jackson. Salem's Lot opens with a quotation from Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Tony, an imaginary playmate from The Shining, bears a striking resemblance to another imaginary playmate with the same name from Jackson's Hangsaman. A pivotal scene in Storm of the Century is based on Jackson's The Lottery. A character in Wolves of the Calla references the Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

King was a big fan of John D. MacDonald as he was growing up, and he dedicated the novella Sun Dog to MacDonald, saying "I miss you, old friend." For his part, MacDonald wrote an admiring preface to an early paperback version of Night Shift, and even had his famous character, Travis McGee, reading Cujo in one of the last McGee novels.

In an interview with Amazon.com, King claimed that the one book he wishes he'd written is William Golding's Lord of the Flies.

King makes references in several of his books to characters and events in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Robert A. Heinlein's book The Door Into Summer is repeatedly mentioned in King's Wolves of the Calla, the fifth book of The Dark Tower.

Collaborations

King has written two novels with acclaimed horror novelist Peter Straub, The Talisman and a sequel, Black House. King has indicated that he and Straub will likely write the third and concluding book in this series, the tale of Jack Sawyer, but has set no timeline for its completion.

King also wrote the nonfiction book, Faithful with novelist and fellow Red Sox fanatic Stewart O'Nan.

The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red, was a paperback tie-in for the King-penned miniseries Rose Red. The book was published under anonymous authorship, and written by Ridley Pearson. This spin-off is a rare occasion of another author being granted permission to write commercial work using characters and story elements invented by King.

Influence on popular culture

Main article: List of cultural references to Stephen King

Since the publication of Carrie, public awareness of King and his works has reached a high saturation rate. As the best-selling novelist in the world, and the most financially successful horror writer in history, King is an American horror icon of the highest order. King's books and characters encompass primary fears in such an iconic manner that his stories have become synonymous with certain key genre ideas. Carrie, Christine, Cujo, It, and The Shining, for example, are instantly recognizable to millions as popular shorthand for the Vengeful Nerd Wronged, the Killer car, the Evil dog, the Evil Clown, and the Haunted Hotel. Even King himself is so recognizable to the American public that in an American Express advertisement, the writer was able to satirize his spooky image in 30 seconds, and Gary Larson could portray a young Stephen King torturing his toys in a Far Side panel, without extensive explanation.

Trivia

• When asked why he writes, King responds: "The answer to that is fairly simple - there was nothing else I was made to do. I was made to write stories and I love to write stories. That's why I do it. I really can't imagine doing anything else and I can't imagine not doing what I do."
• King used to play guitar in the band Rock Bottom Remainders but has not joined them on stage for some years. The band's members include: Dave Barry; Ridley Pearson; Scott Turow; Amy Tan; James McBride; Mitch Albom; Roy Blount Jr.; Matt Groening; Kathi Kamen Goldmark; and Greg Iles. None of them claims to have any musical talent.
• King is a fan of the rock band AC/DC. They did the soundtrack for his 1986 film Maximum Overdrive.
• King was also a fan of The Ramones, who wrote the song Pet Sematary for the movie. In addition he wrote the liner notes for their tribute album We're a Happy Family.
• Many of his novels feature Plymouth Valiants or Dodge Darts and their derivatives (Scamp, Duster, etc.). Christine was about an earlier Chrysler car, a 1958 Plymouth Fury.
• Stephen King does not own a cell phone, a fact pointed out on the dust jacket of Cell, a horror novel where cell phones reduce millions of people into homicidal maniacs.
• 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.
• He has a mentally challenged niece who also is a paraplegic.
• King wrote an introduction to one of Neil Gaiman's many graphic novel collections, and expressed admiration for him.
• Many of the settings for King's books are in Maine (although often fictional locations).
• Many of King's books have one or more characters make a reference (almost always offhand) to being in the military or in "the war."
• King is friends with film director George Romero, to whom he partly dedicated his book Cell, and wrote a tribute about the filmmaker in Entertainment Weekly for his pop culture column, as well as an essay for the Elite DVD version of Night of the Living Dead. Romero is rumored to be directing the adaptations of King's novels The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and From a Buick 8.
• Unlike some authors, King is untroubled by movies based on his works differing from the original work, and is often pleased with film adaptations of his work. He has contrasted his books and its film adaptations as "apples and oranges; both delicious, but very different." The exception to this is The Shining, which King criticized when it was released in 1980; and The Lawnmower Man (he sued to have his name removed from the credits). King seems to have gained greater appreciation for Kubrick's The Shining over the years. Kubrick had knocked the original novel in an interview as not "literary," having its merits exclusively in the plot. This understandably may have upset King. As a film, The Lawnmower Man bore no resemblance whatsoever to King's original short story. King's name was used solely as a faux-brand.
• King is a fan of the DC Comics superhero Batman, and wrote an introduction to the 400th issue of the Batman comic book, dated October 1986.
• King is also a fan of the American television series Lost and wrote an essay on the show for Entertainment Weekly. Speculation that King wrote the tie-in novel Bad Twin under the pseudonym Gary Troup has been discredited.
• After a private screening of the film Stand By Me (which was an adaptation of his novella The Body), King told director Rob Reiner that it was the best film adaptation of any of his works up to that point. He said it was actually better than his original novella. King was also very happy with the job Frank Darabont did with The Green Mile.
• During preproduction of The Shining, at around 3 o'clock in the morning, Stanley Kubrick called Stephen King to ask "Aren't ghost stories really just an affirmation of an afterlife?" King did not necessarily agree. During the conversation, Kubrick asked flatly, "Do you believe in God?" King thought a minute and said, "Yeah, I think so." Kubrick replied, "No, I don't think there is a God," and hung up.
• Stephen King's complete works include over 200 stories.
• King has said that he thinks that Lisey's Story is his best book.
• King has written over 50 books, all of them are #1 bestsellers.
• King is sometimes asked in an interview where he gets his ideas for his stories and novels. Several times, including the appearance on Amazon.com's Fishbowl, the answer has been "I have the heart of a small boy......and I keep it in a jar on my desk." (This quote is most often attributed to Robert Bloch, author of _Psycho_.)
• By February 2007 King has stated that a future book will be a sequel/prequel novel of The Shawshank Redemption which will tell the story of Red before he was sentenced to Shawshank and his life with Andy after finally being released. The novel supposedly tells more about Andy and the break down of his marriage. King is hoping to start the novel after other works in his schedule are completed.
• Stephen King has gone on record stating that he is a Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor fan in an October of 2004 interview "I've always been a TrentRez fan--and Nails. "Hurt" says all you need to know about what life takes away. What it ALWAYS takes away in the end. A song like that is a treasure because it vocalizes what we all feel but somehow can't say. Of course the Cash video blew me away, but that song (and the Bad Company lyric) have been in my head for a couple of years now."[1]

Bibliography

• Stephen King bibliography
• Short fiction by Stephen King
• List of books to which Stephen King has written an introduction

Films and TV

Many of King's novels and short stories have been made into major motion pictures or TV movies and miniseries. See List of Stephen King films.

Year	Title	Notes
1976	Carrie
1979	Salem's Lot	TV movie
1980	The Shining
1982	Creepshow	Based on the short story The Crate and the Weeds
1983	Cujo
1983	The Dead Zone
1983	Christine
1984	Children of the Corn	Based on the short story of the same name. First in a 7-part series; the last four were video-only releases.
1984	Firestarter	A TV-only sequel, Firestarter 2: Rekindled, was made in 2002
1985	Silver Bullet	Based on the novella Cycle of the Werewolf
1986	Maximum Overdrive	Based on the short story Trucks. To date, this is the only film King directed himself.
1986	Stand By Me	Based on the novella The Body
1987	The Running Man	Based on the novel written as Richard Bachman
1989	Pet Sematary
1990	Graveyard Shift	Based on the short story Graveyard Shift
1990	It	TV miniseries
1990	Misery
1993	The Dark Half
1993	The Tommyknockers	TV miniseries
1993	Needful Things
1994	The Stand	TV miniseries
1994	The Shawshank Redemption	Based on the short story Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption
1995	Dolores Claiborne
1995	The Langoliers	TV movie based on the short story The Langoliers
1996	Thinner	Based on the novel written as Richard Bachman
1997	Trucks	TV movie based on the short story Trucks
1997	The Shining	TV miniseries
1997	The Night Flier	Based on the short story The Night Flier
1998	Apt Pupil	Based on the novella Apt Pupil
1999	The Green Mile
2001	Hearts in Atlantis
2002	Carrie	TV movie originally intended to be a series pilot
2003	Dreamcatcher
2004	Secret Window	Based on the novella Secret Window, Secret Garden
2004	'Salem's Lot	TV miniseries
2004	Riding the Bullet	Based on the short story Riding the Bullet
2006	Desperation	TV movie
2006	Nightmares and Dreamscapes	TV miniseries featuring adaptations of various short stories

Film and TV Trivia

• Since 1977, King has granted permission to student filmmakers to make adaptations of his short stories for one dollar (see Dollar Baby).
• King is rumored to have many of the film props from the numerous movies he has written the original book for in his house, including the car used in Christine and a life-sized model of Barlow the Vampire from 'Salem's Lot.
• In the Tv Show Quantum Leap, there is an episode in which a young Stephen King gets inspired to write horror.
• King appeared in the film Pet Sematary as the minister at a funeral.
• He appeared in an episode of The Simpsons called Insane Clown Poppy along with author Amy Tan.
• King made his feature film acting debut in Creepshow, playing Jordy Verrill, a backwoods redneck who, after touching a fallen meteor in hopes of selling it, grows moss all over his body.
• Stephen King appeared in season 1 of Chapelle's Show asking whether African Americans preferred black dentists and undertakers to white ones.
• He produced, wrote, and acted in his own miniseries, called Kingdom Hospital.
• King co-wrote The X-Files season 5 episode "Chinga" with the creator of the series Chris Carter.
• King appeared in the claymation TV series Celebrity Deathmatch and fought against JK Rowling
• King was mentioned in the film Mr. Deeds when it is said that a gas station attendant made eye contact with him and that night lost 200 lb.
• Stephen King has a humorous cameo appearance as a pizza delivery man in the film "Stephen Kings Rose Red"
• In the miniseries of The Stand, King appeared as a minor character, and wrote the teleplay for it.

See also

General information and publishers

Books about Stephen King Dollar Baby Doubleday Tabitha King List of cultural references to Stephen King

List of Stephen King films Philtrum Press Rock Bottom Remainders Scribner Viking Press

The books

Novels by Stephen King Novels by Richard Bachman Short stories by Stephen King Short story collections by Stephen King

Stephen King characters The Dark Tower index Stephen King's inspiration Castle Rock, Maine Derry, Maine

External links

• Stephen King's Official Web Site
• Stephen & Tabitha King Foundation
• Scribner, Stephen King's trade publisher
• Cemetery Dance Publications, a publisher of Stephen King's signed Limited Editions
• The Stephen King Message Board
• WorldCat Identities page for 'King, Stephen 1947-'
• Lilja's Library, "A site with a huge of information"
• The ka-tet Corporation
• Stephen King at IMDb
• Stephen King at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Template:Nndb name
• Stephen King at the Internet Book List
• AMC poll: List of Stephen King novels made into movies
• The Stand: The Original Screenplay the version you never saw, written by Rospo Pallenberg