Short answers, pulled from the story.
Stephen King was born on the 21st of September 1947 in Portland, Maine. His father abandoned the family when King was two, and his mother raised him and his brother David alone, moving them across multiple states including Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Connecticut before settling in Durham, Maine, when King was eleven.
Richard Bachman is a pseudonym King used to publish five novels between 1977 and 1984, including The Long Walk and The Running Man. He adopted the name because publishers believed the public would accept only one book per year from a single author. The pseudonym was exposed in 1985 by Washington, D.C. bookstore clerk Steve Brown, who found publisher's records at the Library of Congress naming King as the author.
King began Carrie as a short story for the magazine Cavalier, combining two unrelated ideas: adolescent cruelty and telekinesis. He threw the first three pages in the trash, but his wife Tabitha retrieved them and urged him to expand the story into a novel. Carrie was published in 1974 and established King in the horror genre.
On the 19th of June 1999, King was struck by a minivan while walking on the shoulder of Maine State Route 5 in Lovell, Maine. The driver, Bryan Edwin Smith, was distracted by an unrestrained dog in his vehicle. King suffered a collapsed right lung, multiple fractures of his right leg, a broken hip, and a scalp laceration. He was hospitalized at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston until the 9th of July and underwent five operations in ten days.
The National Book Foundation awarded King the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003, which drew public criticism from literary figures including critic Harold Bloom, who called it "another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life," and former Simon & Schuster CEO Richard E. Snyder, who described King's work as "non-literature." Novelist Shirley Hazzard also criticized the choice, though she later acknowledged she had never read him.
King has named Richard Matheson as the author who influenced him most. His other stated influences include Ray Bradbury, James M. Cain, Elmore Leonard, and John D. MacDonald. For descriptive prose, he credits Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams. He has also engaged directly with the literary tradition of horror, using Bram Stoker's Dracula as a conscious model for 'Salem's Lot and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a template for Revival.