Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. His father abandoned the family when King was two, leaving his mother Ruth to raise Stephen and his older brother David alone. King grew up in a series of small Maine towns, absorbing the landscape, the people, and the particular texture of working-class New England life that would become the raw material of his fiction. He began writing stories as a child, selling mimeographed horror newsletters to his classmates, and by the time he enrolled at the University of Maine, he was already a committed, prolific, and technically competent fiction writer.
After graduating in 1970 with a degree in English, King taught high school while accumulating rejections and writing in the laundry room of his family's trailer. Carrie — the novel that launched his career — was nearly abandoned; King threw the manuscript in the trash, and his wife Tabitha retrieved it and urged him to finish it. Doubleday bought it for $2,500 in 1973, and the paperback sale the following year for $400,000 changed his life entirely. From that moment, King wrote with an almost biological regularity: novel after novel, story after story, the output sustained across decades at a pace that most writers could not match in productivity even if they had his quality.
King's prolificacy is inseparable from his INTJ character: he has described writing as a form of thinking, as the process by which he discovers what he knows and believes rather than the expression of pre-formed ideas. He writes 2,000 words a day, every day, including holidays and birthdays. His working method is systematic: he begins with a situation, not a plot, and follows the characters to discover what they will do — but this apparent spontaneity is underpinned by a rigorous underlying architecture of theme, symbol, and recurrent mythology that links his entire body of work. The Dark Tower series, which occupied him for over forty years, is the clearest expression of this architecture: a mythological superstructure connecting virtually every novel and story he has written.
King survived a near-fatal accident in 1999 when he was struck by a van while walking along a rural road, an experience he documented in On Writing — which functions simultaneously as memoir, craft manual, and philosophical statement about the relationship between writing and survival. His cultural influence is extraordinary: more films and television adaptations have been made from his work than from that of any other living author, and his work has shaped contemporary horror as definitively as Poe shaped the gothic tradition. He received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003.
