Stephen King

If you enjoy curling up in front of the fireplace with a good book on a dark and stormy night, in hopes it'll make you shiver with terror, then read one of Stephen King's books.  They're just what the doctor ordered to bring on the most delicious nightmares..

Stephen King's Biography

List of Stephen King's Works

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Stephen King's Biography

Stephen King has fascinated the world with his horror since 1973 when "Carrie" made its debut.  Since then he has written well over twenty novels, screenplays, and numerous short stories.  Not since Edgar Allen Poe has a horror writer been so widely read and accepted. For Poe, unfortunately, it was posthumously.  For Stephen King it is now.  King earns approximately fifteen million dollars a book and he publishes two books a year.

In 1978 or 1979, Writer's Digest Magazine published a short summary of King's rags-to-riches story.  In that particular article he was said to be living in a boarding house in Maine with a community laundry room.  He would sit in the laundry room, his used manual portable setting across his knees, typing "Salem's Lot", huddled up next to the hot water pipes and heating vents just to keep warm.  According to the article, both he and his wife Tabitha were barely surviving financially.  He had had several short stories published by this time, but the income from these did little to ease their financial burden.  Then one day in 1974, King found an advance check for "Carrie" in his mail box for $600,000.00 and the rest is history.

In William F. Nolan's book "How to Write Horror Fiction" 1990 King had been living in a trailer park in Maine with his wife Tabitha and two children at the time he received his advance check for "Carrie."  Additionally Nolan points out that King had written five books at this point but had not found a home for any of them.

The difference in the Writer's Digest version and Nolan's version may only be my memory since I no longer have the magazine article.  And it may be that both articles are referring to the same place since trailer parks also have community laundry rooms.  What is interesting here, is the rags-to-riches theme and that King had to do a great deal of writing and submitting before he made his major break in the fiction market.

Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine in September 21, 1947.  He wrote his first story at the age of seven and sold his first horror story to "Startling Mystery Stories" at the age of twenty.  He earned his bachelor's degree in English from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970.   At one time, King had five titles listed on the New York Times best-seller list.  Today he is the known and loved by many as the Master of Horror.

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Stephen King's Works

NOVELS

Carrie
Salem's Lot
The Shining
The Stand
The Dead Zone
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
Firestarter
Cujo
Christine
Pet Sematary
Cycle of the Werewolf
The Talisman
(with Peter Straub)
It
Eyes of the Dragon
Misery
The Tommyknockers
The Dark Half
Needful Things
Gerald's Game
Dolores Claiborne
Insomnia

AS RICHARD BACHMAN

Rage
The Long Walk
Roadwork
The Running Man
Thinner

COLLECTIONS

Night Shift
Different Season
Skeleton Crew
Four Past Midnight
Nightmares and Dreamscapes

NONFICTION

Danse Macabre

SCREENPLAYS

Creepshow
Cat's Eye
Silver Bullet
Maximum Overdrive
Pet Sematary
Golden Years
Sleepwalkers
The Stand

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