Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, at the Maine General Hospital in Portland. His parents were Nellie Ruth (Pillsbury), who worked as a caregiver at a mental institute, and Donald Edwin King, a merchant seaman. His father was born under the surname "Pollock", but used the last name "King", under which Stephen was born. He has an older brother, David. The Kings were a typical family until one night, when Donald said he was stepping out for cigarettes and was never heard from again. Ruth took over raising the family with help from relatives. They traveled throughout many states over several years, finally moving back to Durham, Maine, in 1958.

Stephen began his actual writing career in January of 1959, when David and Stephen decided to publish their own local newspaper named "Dave's Rag". David bought a mimeograph machine, and they put together a paper they sold for five cents an issue. Stephen attended Lisbon High School, in Lisbon, in 1962. Collaborating with his best friend Chris Chesley in 1963, they published a collection of 18 short stories called "People, Places, and Things--Volume I". King's stories included "Hotel at the End of the Road", "I've Got to Get Away!", "The Dimension Warp", "The Thing at the Bottom of the Well", "The Stranger", "I'm Falling", "The Cursed Expedition", and "The Other Side of the Fog." A year later, King's amateur press, Triad and Gaslight Books, published a two-part book titled "The Star Invaders".

King made his first actual published appearance in 1965 in the magazine Comics Review with his story "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber." The story ran about 6,000 words in length. In 1966 he graduated from high school and took a scholarship to attend the University of Maine. Looking back on his high school days, King recalled that "my high school career was totally undistinguished. I was not at the top of my class, nor at the bottom." Later that summer King began working on a novel called "Getting It On", about some kids who take over a classroom and try unsuccessfully to ward off the National Guard. During his first year at college, King completed his first full-length novel, "The Long Walk." He submitted the novel to Bennett Cerf/Random House only to have it rejected. King took the rejection badly and filed the book away.

He made his first small sale--$35--with the story "The Glass Floor". In June 1970 King graduated from the University of Maine with a Bachelor of Science degree in English and a certificate to teach high school. King's next idea came from the poem by Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." He found bright colored green paper in the library and began work on "The Dark Tower" saga, but his chronic shortage of money meant that he was unable to further pursue the novel, and it, too, was filed away. King took a job at a filling station pumping gas for the princely sum of $1.25 an hour. Soon he began to earn money for his writings by submitting his short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier.

On January 2, 1971, he married Tabitha King (born Tabitha Jane Spruce). In the fall of 1971 King took a teaching job at Hampden Academy, earning $6,400 a year. The Kings then moved to Hermon, a town west of Bangor. Stephen then began work on a short story about a teenage girl named Carietta White. After completing a few pages, he decided it was not a worthy story and crumpled the pages up and tossed them into the trash. Fortunately, Tabitha took the pages out and read them. She encouraged her husband to continue the story, which he did. In January 1973 he submitted "Carrie" to Doubleday. In March Doubleday bought the book. On May 12 the publisher sold the paperback rights for the novel to New American Library for $400,000. His contract called for his getting half of that sum, and he quit his teaching job to pursue writing full time. The rest, as they say, is history.

Since then King has had numerous short stories and novels published and movies made from his work. He has been called the "Master of Horror". His books have been translated into 33 different languages, published in over 35 different countries. There are over 300 million copies of his novels in publication. He continues to live in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, and writes out of his home.

In June 1999 King was severely injured in an accident, he was walking alongside a highway and was hit by a car, that left him in critical condition with injuries to his lung, broken ribs, a broken leg and a severely fractured hip. After three weeks of operations, he was released from the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Christian Skibinski

Spouse (1) Tabitha King (Tabitha Jane Spruce) (2 January 1971 - present) (3 children) Naomi Rachel King (1970), Joseph Hillstrom King (June 4, 1972), Owen Philip King(February 21, 1977)

Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American writer of contemporary horror fiction, science fiction, fantasy literature, and screenplays. More than 350 million copies of King`s novels and short story collections have been sold, and many of his stories have been adapted for film, television, and other media. King has written a number of books using the pen name Richard Bachman, and one short story, "The Fifth Quarter", as John Swithen. In 2003 the National Book Foundation awarded King the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine. When King was two years old, his father, who was a merchant seaman, left the family under the pretense of "going to buy a pack of cigarettes", leaving his mother to raise King and his adopted older brother David by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. The family moved to De Pere, Wisconsin; Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Stratford, Connecticut. When King was eleven years old, the family returned to Durham, Maine, where Ruth King cared for her parents until their deaths. She then became a caterer in a local residential facility for the mentally challenged. King and his wife own and occupy three different houses, one in Bangor, one in Center, Lovell, Maine, and they regularly winter in their waterfront mansion located off the Gulf of Mexico, in Sarasota, Florida. He and Tabitha have three children and four grandchildren. Tabitha King has published nine of her own novels. Both King`s sons are published authors.

Naomi Rachel King, 1970, Joseph Hillstrom King (born June 4, 1972), and Owen Philip King (born February 21, 1977)

Stephen King wrote his first short story at seven, and was first published (in a comic fanzine) at 18. After attending the University of Maine, he worked as a sportswriter for his local newspaper and labored away for a while in an industrial laundry. He was teaching high school English at Maine's Hampden Academy when his first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974.

Over the next decade he blossomed into the most popular writer in America, as well as one of the most prolific; in addition to the books published under his own name, he also wrote five pseudonymously as Richard Bachman (one of these, The Running Man, was filmed in 1989, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead). No mere hack or dilettante, as has sometimes been alleged, King puts his whole heart and soul in every chiller he writes: His criteria is that if it can scare him, it will scare everyone else. Beginning with 1976's Carrie, virtually all of King's novels have been adapted to the screen -- but only a third or so of the filmizations have been truly worth the effort. For every above-average effort like The Shining (1980), The Dead Zone (1983), and Misery (1990), there has been a failure like Pet Cemetery (1989) and Needful Things (1993). While he claims to have adopted a "take the money and run" philosophy concerning most of his filmed novels, King has, in fact, taken a more active part in movies than most of his contemporaries. He often plays small roles in the films based on his works, and in 1986 he made his directorial bow with Maximum Overdrive. He also directed the first five episodes of the 1991 TV series Stephen King's The Golden Years, and essayed a small role as a bus driver. His other TV contributions have included the miniseries It! (1990), Sometimes They Come Back (1991), The Tommyknockers (1993), The Stand (1994), and The Langoliers (1995).

In 1997, King oversaw a television miniseries remake of The Shining to insure that it would be closer to his original vision than the 1980 Kubrick film. Not entirely confined to hair-raisers, Stephen King has also turned out "straight" tales like The Body and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, both of which have been filmed as, respectively, Stand by Me (1986) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994). In the years that followed The Shawshank Redemption drew a massive cult following on home video and DVD, and became on of King's most celebrated celluliod adaptations. Of course this would eventually lead to many more film adaptations of King's more dramatic works, and with such efforts as Dolores Caliborne, The Green Mile and Hearts in Atlantis, King adaptations began to take on an air of sophistication (a great irony considering the author himself has deemed his writings to the literary equivilant of a Big Mac and fries) that attracted the likes of such respected dramatic actors as Tom Hanks and Anthony Hopkins.

Of course endless sequels to such earlier adaptations as Sometimes They Come Back and Children of the Corn continued to flood the straight-to-video and lend some air of truth to his statements regarding his work, and it seemed that every few years a miniseries based on one of King's novels was almost mandatory. If a belated 1999 sequel to Brian De Palma's 1976 film adaptation of Carrie seemed little more than an attempt to cash in on the current trend towards post-Scream teen horror, a made-for-television remake of the original in 2002 was simply unnecessary. In 2002 The Dead Zone was adapted into a well-recieved television series, and though such feature efforts as 2003's ambitious but laughably flawed Dreamcather proved that filmmakers were willing to take risks with some of the King's more unconventional stories. After adapting Lars Von Trier's acclaimed Danish television chiller The Kingdom into Kingdom Hospital in 2004, fans could look forward to yet another made-for-television adaptation of Salem's Lot and the David Koepp directed Johnny Depp vehicle Secret Window later that same year. Of course as always the line forming to adapt King novels to screen could last be seen winding around the block, and screen versions of Riding the Bullet, The Talisman, Bag of Bones and Desperation wer all in the making as of early 2004. King's writing would continue to spawn several movie and TV projects per year for the next decade, in everything from short films like Survivor Type, to feature films like Grey Matter, to TV series like Heaven.

On a personal note, King suffered massive injuries when struck by a minivan while walking outside in June of 1999, a mere month after announcing that he would likely go blind as a result of being stricken with Macular Degeneration. Though King would eventually recover from the injuries he sustained in the minivan incident, there was little doctors could do to halt the devastating effects of his incurable eye condition and an announcement that he would cease writing in 2002 proved a sad blow to legions of loyal fans.

Biography by Hal Erickson [-]

http://www.allmovie.com/artist/stephen-king-p97473