Stephen King

• 1. Introduction

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  Stephen King was walking on the shoulder of Maine State Route 5 on the 19th of June 1999 when a minivan struck him and sent him into a depression in the ground about fourteen feet from the pavement. The driver was distracted by a dog moving in the back of the vehicle. King's right lung collapsed, his right leg shattered in multiple places, his hip broke, and his scalp tore open. Later, from his hospital bed, he reflected that he had "nearly been killed by a character out of one of my own novels." He told his nurses in no uncertain terms not to make any Misery jokes.

  That collision is a useful entry point into a career built on the idea that ordinary life is always one wrong turn away from catastrophe. Born in Portland, Maine, on the 21st of September 1947, King has published approximately two hundred short stories, novels stretching into the thousands of pages, nonfiction, screenplays, comics, and collaborations with his own children. He has been called "the King of Horror" by admirers and "a writer of penny dreadfuls" by detractors, and he has accumulated enough awards, controversies, and second chances to fill several separate lives.

  How did a boy raised by a single mother moving from town to town across the American Midwest become the most-adapted author in Hollywood history? What does his Richard Bachman pseudonym reveal about his anxieties as a working writer? And what does the ferocious literary establishment argument over his 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters tell us about where popular fiction sits in American culture? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Childhood of Closed Doors

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  King's father, Donald Edwin King, abandoned the family when Stephen was two years old. His mother, Nellie Ruth King, raised Stephen and his older brother David alone, moving the family across multiple states, including stops in Chicago, Illinois; Croton-on-Hudson, New York; West De Pere, Wisconsin; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Malden, Massachusetts; and Stratford, Connecticut. When King was eleven, they settled in Durham, Maine, where his mother cared for her own aging parents.

  King traces the start of his writing to around the age of six or seven, when he began copying panels from comic books and then making up his own stories. His mother's reaction to one early effort set the direction for everything that followed. He showed her a story he had copied, and she told him he could do better. Write one of his own, she said. He recalls feeling "an immense feeling of possibility at the idea, as if I had been ushered into a vast building filled with closed doors and had been given the key to open any I liked."

  His reading was omnivorous and precocious. He consumed Nancy Drew alongside Psycho. His favorite was The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson, which he found at the age of eight. A pivotal encounter came when he asked a bookmobile driver for stories about how kids really are, and she handed him Lord of the Flies. He would later describe it as the first book with hands, "strong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat."

  He sold his first independently published story, "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber", which was serialized across four issues of the fanzine Comics Review in 1965. By that point he had already been contributing to the newspaper his brother printed with a mimeograph machine and selling stories to friends at school. He entered the University of Maine at Orono in 1966 on a scholarship, where he found two faculty mentors: professors Edward Holmes and Burton Hatlen. It was in a writing workshop organized by Hatlen that he met Tabitha Spruce, who would become his wife. He graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English.

• 3. Carrie and the Years of Struggle

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  King sold his first professional short story, "The Glass Floor", to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967, the year after he entered the university. After graduating, he earned a teaching certificate but could not find a post immediately and sold short stories to magazines including Cavalier. In 1971, he was hired as an English teacher at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine, and continued writing on the side.

  The origin of Carrie, his 1974 debut, began with a discarded attempt. King was writing a short story for Cavalier when he threw the first three pages in the trash. His wife Tabitha retrieved them, read them, and told him he had something there. She urged him to expand the story into a novel. The result was the story of Carrie White, a high-school student with latent telekinetic powers and a hysterically religious mother, brutal in places and affecting in others. The New York Times noted that King "does more than tell a story" and that "he gets into Carrie's mind as well as into the minds of her classmates."

  'Salem's Lot grew from a question King asked himself while teaching Dracula: what would happen if Old World vampires came to a small New England town? He called it "Peyton Place meets Dracula." His mother died from uterine cancer around the time the book was published. After her death, the family moved to Boulder, Colorado, where King paid a visit to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. That hotel became the basis for The Shining, about an alcoholic writer and his family taking care of an empty hotel for the winter. It was around this period that King began to suspect he was himself an alcoholic.

  The family returned to Auburn, Maine, in 1975, where King completed The Stand, an apocalyptic novel about a pandemic. He later said it was the novel that took him the longest to write and also the one his longtime readers seemed to like best. In 1979, he published The Dead Zone, the first of his novels set in Castle Rock, Maine, and he later said it was with that book that he "really hit my stride."

• 4. The Bachman Experiment

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  Five short novels appeared under the name Richard Bachman: Rage in 1977, The Long Walk in 1979, Roadwork in 1981, The Running Man in 1982, and Thinner in 1984. The motive was practical. Publishing houses in those years believed the public would accept only one book per year from a single author. King needed an outlet for work he felt readers might like but that could not appear under his own name without saturating the market.

  The pseudonym was constructed with care. Bachman's surname came from the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive. The first name was a nod to Richard Stark, the darker pseudonym used by crime novelist Donald E. Westlake. The books themselves were notably grittier than King's usual work. He described his alter-ego as "dark-toned, despairing... not a very nice guy." In an episode that must have both stung and amused him, a Literary Guild member praised Thinner as "what Stephen King would write like if Stephen King could really write."

  The secret lasted until 1985, when a Washington, D.C. bookstore clerk named Steve Brown noticed stylistic similarities between King and Bachman and tracked down publisher's records at the Library of Congress naming King as the author of Rage. King announced Bachman's death from "cancer of the pseudonym." He later reflected that Bachman had begun to take on his own reality and that when his cover was blown, "he died."

  The character of Bachman did not entirely disappear. When Desperation was published in 1996, its companion novel The Regulators appeared as a "discovered manuscript" by Bachman. In 2006, King announced he had found another Bachman novel, Blaze, whose original 1973 manuscript had been held at the University of Maine for decades. King rewrote it for publication. He had also originally planned to release Misery under the Bachman name before his identity was exposed.

• 5. Addiction and Its Doubles

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  King has said that he "barely remembers writing" Cujo, which he published in 1981 while struggling with addiction. The acknowledgment is not an isolated one. Throughout the 1980s, he wrote under the influence of alcohol and drugs. Misery, about a popular writer injured in a car wreck and held captive by his self-described "number-one fan", was his own description of addiction: the fan as the substance that holds the writer prisoner. The Tommyknockers, a science fiction novel published after Misery, was also, he says, filled with metaphors for addiction.

  After the publication of The Tommyknockers, Tabitha King staged an intervention, and he agreed to seek treatment. The creative consequences of sobriety were almost immediate. His first novel after achieving sobriety was Needful Things in 1991, billed as "The Last Castle Rock Story." Two years after treatment, he published The Dark Half, about a writer who tries to kill off his literary alter-ego, only to find the alter-ego has taken on a life of its own. In the author's note, King writes that he is "indebted to the late Richard Bachman" - a private joke that carried considerable personal weight given what the Bachman persona had meant to him.

  His 1992 novels Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne are two separate novels about women, loosely linked by a solar eclipse. The character of Dolores Claiborne was based, King said, on his own mother. Mark Singer described the narration as "a morally riveting confession from the earthy mouth of a sixty-six-year-old Maine coastal-island native with a granite-hard life but not a grain of self-pity." By 1992, according to critic S. T. Joshi, King had begun tempering his worst writing faults, producing books that were leaner and generally better written.

• 6. The Literary Establishment Fight

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  In 1994, The New Yorker published King's story "The Man in the Black Suit" in its Halloween issue, and the story won the O. Henry Award in 1996. By 2003, when the National Book Foundation honored King with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, his presence in a literary magazine regarded as the pinnacle of American letters had done nothing to soften certain critical positions.

  Richard E. Snyder, the former CEO of Simon & Schuster, described King's work as "non-literature." Harold Bloom was more direct: "The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for 'distinguished contribution' to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind." The novelist Shirley Hazzard, whose novel The Great Fire won the National Book Award that same year, also criticized the choice. She later admitted she had never read him.

  King's acceptance speech did not flinch. He quoted Frank Norris: "What should I care if they single me out for sneers and laughter? I never truckled, I never lied. I told the truth." He acknowledged the controversy directly and added that whether the critics were for or against the decision, they shared a passion for the book and the page. "In that sense," he said, "we're all brothers and sisters."

  Other writers came to his defense with more specificity. Roger Ebert wrote that after finding On Writing to have more useful observations about craft than any book since Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, he had gotten over his own snobbery. Cynthia Ozick, who shared a reading stage with King, said it dawned on her while listening to him that "this man is a genuine, true-born writer." She added: "His writing is filled with literary history. It's not glib... and it's not stupid." In 2007, he received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and in 2014 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

• 7. Craft, Voice, and Influence

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  In On Writing, King describes his creative process through a geological metaphor: stories are fossils in the ground. The writer's job is to excavate them intact. He does not begin with plot. He begins with a "what-if" scenario - what if an alcoholic writer was stranded with his family in a haunted hotel, what if one could see the outcome of future events, what if one could travel in time to prevent a political assassination. Characters arrive flat and unfeatured, and then the writer follows where they lead.

  Joyce Carol Oates identified his central subject as "small-town American life, often set in fictitious Derry, Maine; tales of family life, marital life, the lives of children banded together by age, circumstance, and urgency, where parents prove oblivious or helpless." She also praised his use of authors as protagonists, a recurring pattern visible in Ben Mears in 'Salem's Lot, Jack Torrance in The Shining, and Mike Noonan in Bag of Bones. King extended the technique further by including himself as a character in three novels of The Dark Tower series.

  His influences are explicitly literary. Richard Matheson, whom he called "the author who influenced me most", shapes his sensibility throughout. For description, he credits Chandler, Hammett, Ross Macdonald, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams. When writing 'Salem's Lot, he used Bram Stoker's Dracula as a deliberate wall to play against, watching how the story bounced and changed. Revival is a modern riff on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; he dedicated it to, among others, Shelley, Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, and Shirley Jackson.

  His influence on younger writers is tracked across multiple traditions. Sherman Alexie, growing up on a reservation, identified with King's protagonists because King "was always writing about underdogs, and bullied kids, and kids fighting back against overwhelming, often supernatural forces." Colson Whitehead recalls that the first big book he ever read was Night Shift. Junot Diaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao features a hero who dreams of being "the Dominican Stephen King." David Foster Wallace assigned Carrie and The Stand to his students at Illinois State University and praised King's ear for authentic American dialogue. Lauren Groff says the greatest thing she took from reading King was "his big-hearted glee" and his sense of writing as something he was "over-the-moon delighted to be lucky enough to do."

• 8. Maine, Money, and Later Work

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  King has stated that he donates approximately four million dollars per year to libraries, local fire departments, schools, and arts organizations. The Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation ranks sixth among Maine charities in terms of average annual giving, with over two point eight million dollars in grants per year. He endowed scholarships named for his University of Maine professor Edward Holmes, and he subsidizes the National Poetry Foundation, which was directed by his other mentor, Burton Hatlen.

  The philanthropy is rooted in Maine. The couple own houses in Bangor, in Lovell, and a waterfront mansion in Sarasota, Florida, for the winter. The Bangor home has become an unofficial tourist attraction; the Kings plan to convert it into a facility housing his archives and a writers' retreat. In November 2011, his radio station donated seventy thousand dollars in matched funding to help pay heating bills for families in need in Bangor during the winter. In 2002, King joined Peter Straub, John Grisham, and Pat Conroy for the Wavedancer Benefit, a public reading to raise funds for audiobook reader Frank Muller after Muller was injured in a motorcycle accident.

  All three of his children have pursued careers that reflect his world. Naomi Rachel King, born in 1970, became a Unitarian Universalist Church minister. Owen King, born in 1977, published his first collection of stories in 2005. Joseph Hillstrom King, born in 1972 and known as Joe Hill, published his first short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts, also in 2005. King and Joe Hill co-wrote the novella Throttle in 2009 as a homage to Richard Matheson's "Duel," and King and Owen co-wrote the novel Sleeping Beauties in 2018.

  You Like It Darker, a short story collection featuring twelve stories, debuted at number one on the New York Times fiction best-seller list for the week ending the 25th of May 2024. In December 2024, King announced that his radio station group, which he and Tabitha had established in 1983 beginning with WACZ in Bangor, would shut down at the end of the year, citing his advancing age and financial losses. He reached a deal to sell one station, WKIT, to two Bangor businessmen; the other two remained slated for closure. The man who built his creative life around Maine was, in the end, still making decisions anchored there.