1947-present
Who Is Stephen King?
Stephen King is a best-selling author who rose to fame in the 1970s with his debut novel Carrie and has since become known as the “King of Horror.” Starting his career as an English teacher, the Maine native began writing in his spare time. Following the success of Carrie in 1974, King devoted himself to writing full-time. Over the years, King has published more than 60 novels and over 200 short stories, spanning horror, fantasy, science fiction, and crime. Some of his most popular titles include The Shining, The Stand, and IT. King’s books have sold around 350 to 400 million copies worldwide and been adapted into numerous successful films and television series.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Stephen Edwin King
BORN: September 21, 1947
BIRTHPLACE: Portland, Maine
SPOUSE: Tabitha King (1971-present)
CHILDREN: Naomi, Joe, and Owen
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Virgo
Early Life and Career
Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine to Donald King and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. His father, a traveling salesman, left the family when he was just a toddler, leaving his mother to raise him and his older brother, David. The family struggled financially for several years and relied on relatives for lodging and support. As such, King spent his formative years in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father’s family resided, and Stratford, Connecticut.
Growing up, King took an interest in writing at an early age, coming up with his own story ideas by the age of 7. “I was about six or seven, just copying panels out of comic books and then making up my own stories,” he told The Paris Review in 2006. “I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.” Even as a child, King was fan of horror, seeking out movies and radio shows that would scare him. His mother indulged this interest, taking him to see films like Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956) and reading him books like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
When King was 11, he moved back to Maine with his mother and brother, settling in Durham. He attended Durham Elementary School and later Lisbon Falls High School, where he graduated from in 1966. King stayed close to home for college, attending the University of Maine at Orono. There, he wrote a column for the school’s newspaper and worked in the student library. He also served in student government and attended campus protests against the Vietnam War.
While in college, King published his first short story, “The Glass Door,” which appeared in the fall 1967 issue of the pulp science fiction magazine Startling Mystery Stories. During summer breaks, he made extra money working as a janitor at a local school. After graduating with a degree in English in 1970, he tried to find a position as a teacher but had no luck at first. King took a job in a laundry until late 1971, when he began working as an English teacher at Hampden Academy. All the while, he continued to write and publish short stories in his spare time.
Books
Carrie
In 1973, King sold his first novel, Carrie, the tale of a bullied teenage girl who gets revenge on her peers. The book initially started off as a short story, and was almost abandoned altogether. After writing three pages, he tossed it in the trash. Later on, however, his wife, Tabitha King, read the crumpled draft and convinced him to continue working on it. He soon expanded the story into a novel, drawing inspiration from real-life experiences as well as supernatural elements. “Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together, and I had an idea,” he later reflected in his 2000 book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
While working at an industrial laundry facility, King remembered his brief time as a school janitor, during which he cleaned the curtainless shower in the girls’ locker room. “I started seeing the opening scene of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtains or privacy,” he wrote. “And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn’t know what it is, and the other girls—grossed out, horrified, amused—start pelting her with sanitary napkins.”
Salem’s Lot
Carrie was published in 1974 and the book became a huge success, allowing him to devote himself to writing full time. King soon followed up with Salem’s Lot, about a writer who returns to his hometown in Maine only to find that the residents are turning into vampires. He first came up with the idea for the book while he was teaching Bram Stoker’s Dracula to his students. The book was originally titled Second Coming and then Jerusalem’s Lot, before King settled on Salem’s Lot, which was published in 1975. King’s mother died of cancer while he was still working on the novel.
The Shining
After his mother passed, he moved his family to Boulder, Colorado. There, he wrote the popular novel The Shining, which follows an alcoholic writer who moves to Colorado with his wife and kids to work as a caretaker at an isolated hotel in the mountains. Released in 1977, the novel was an instant bestseller. The story was inspired by a nightmare King had while staying at a hotel in Estes Park with his wife. “I thought that it seemed the perfect—maybe the archetypical—setting for a ghost story,” he wrote on his website. “That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a fire-hose.” When King woke up, he smoked a cigarette and stared out at the Rocky Mountains through his hotel window. “By the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind,” he added.
The Stand
King next published The Stand in 1978, a post-apocalyptic fantasy centering around the aftermath of a deadly influenza pandemic. A news segment on biological warfare served as the catalyst for the book. “I never forgot the gruesome footage of the test mice shuddering, convulsing, and dying, all in twenty seconds or less,” he wrote on his website. “That got me remembering a chemical spill in Utah that killed a bunch of sheep...I remembered a news reporter saying, ‘If the winds had been blowing the other way, there was Salt Lake City.’”
Cujo and IT
More popular novels followed, including The Dead Zone (1979), and Firestarter (1980), Cujo (1981), Pet Sematary (1983), and IT (1986). While creating stories about vicious, rabid dogs and sewer-dwelling monsters—as seen in Cujo and IT, respectively—King published several books under the pseudonym, or pen name, Richard Bachman out of concern the public wouldn’t accept more than one book from an author within a year. He came up with the alias after seeing a novel by Richard Stark on his desk coupled with what he heard playing on his record player at the time: “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” by Bachman Turner Overdrive.
The Long Walk and The Running Man
King wrote a total of seven Bachman novels, including the 1979 dystopian thriller The Long Walk, about teenage boys forced to participate in a grueling, deadly walking contest by a totalitarian regime. He had first started writing it in college against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. “You write from your times, so certainly, that was in my mind. But I never thought about it consciously,” King told Vanity Fair in May 2025. “I was writing a kind of a brutal thing. It was hopeless, and just what you write when you’re 19 years old, man. You’re full of beans and you’re full of cynicism, and that’s the way it was.”
He later published another dystopian novel, The Running Man, under the moniker, in 1982, in which a father participates in a deadly reality show to win money to pay for his daughter’s life-saving medication. A few years later, in 1985, King confirmed he was Bachman after a reader contacted his publisher about the similarities in writing style.
All the while, he continued to publish under his real name, going on to write successful novels, such as Misery (1987), Gerald’s Game (1992), The Green Mile (1996), Bag of Bones (1998), Lisey’s Story (2006), and Under the Dome (2009).
Joyland and Doctor Sleep
In 2011, King published 11/22/63, a novel involving time travel as part of an effort to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Two years later, he wrote Joyland, a pulp-fiction style thriller that takes readers on a journey to uncovering who's behind an unsolved murder, and surprised audiences with The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep (2013), which hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. “I’ve been typed as a horror writer, but I never saw myself that way,” King told Parade magazine at the time. “I’ve reached a point in my life where I can write pretty much what comes into my mind and not worry about grocery day at Publix.”
Mr. Mercedes and The Outsider
The author then published Mr. Mercedes (2014), with Finders Keepers (2015) and End of Watch (2016) rounding out the crime trilogy. In honor of his prolific output and success in his craft, King was among the recipients of the National Medal of Arts in 2015. Two years later, he teamed with son Owen to deliver Sleeping Beauties, about a mysterious pandemic that leaves women enveloped in cocoons. King returned to the supernatural in 2018 with The Outsider, revolving around an investigation into a creature that mimics people’s appearances to commit heinous crimes.
The Institute and Recent Works
The following year brought the publication of the tireless writer’s 61st novel, The Institute, about children with supernatural abilities who are taken from their parents and incarcerated by a mysterious organization. “One of the challenges when you’ve been around as long as I have and you think you’ve explored all the corners of the room, you have to say to yourself, ‘What are the things that really concern me? What are the things that I care about?’” King told the New York Times in September 2019. “Well, I care about friendship. I care about a government that’s too big and that will try to do things where the ends justify the means. I care about defenseless people who try to find a way to defend themselves. All those things are in The Institute.”
Overall, King has published more than 65 novels and novellas and over 200 short stories. To date, his books have sold 350 to 400 million copies worldwide. Some of his most recent works include Fairy Tale (2022), Holly (2023), and Never Flinch (2025).
Stance on AI
After a report revealed his work had been used to train AI models, King wrote an essay in The Atlantic in August 2023 about his stance on the issue. In the article, he shared he is skeptical of the technology’s ability to write quality fiction, but noted he wasn’t opposed to its development. “Creativity can’t happen without sentience, and there are now arguments that some AIs are indeed sentient,” King wrote. “If that is true now or in the future, then creativity might be possible. I view this possibility with a certain dreadful fascination.”
TV and Film Adaptations
Throughout his prolific career, many of King’s works have been adapted into movies and TV shows, starting with the Carrie film adaption in 1976. Soon after, the film The Shining, released in 1980 and starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, became a renowned horror thriller that has stood the test of time. From there, Cujo and Firestarter were released for the big screen in 1983 and 1984 respectively, while It debuted as a miniseries in 1990.
Publishing novels and stories at a breakneck speed, King’s thrilling tales continued to be used as the basis of numerous films for the big and small screens. In 1987, he earned his first Richard Bachman adaptation with The Running Man, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Actors Kathy Bates and James Caan starred in the critically and commercially successful adaptation of Misery in 1990, with Bates winning an Oscar for her performance as the psychotic Annie Wilkes.
Four years later, The Shawshank Redemption, based on one of his stories and starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, became another acclaimed outing with multiple Oscar nominations. King’s 1978 novel The Stand became a 1994 miniseries with Molly Ringwald and Gary Sinise in the lead, while the mid-90s serialized outing The Green Mile was turned into a 1999 prison-based film starring Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan.
Meanwhile, adaptations of King’s works have continued to populate the big and small screens. In 2017, the first season of Mr. Mercedes began airing on the Audience Network, while a remake of the horror classic IT enjoyed a hefty box-office haul. In 2019, an adaptation of Doctor Sleep and IT Chapter Two hit theaters, along with a reboot of another signature King property, Pet Sematary. The following year, The Stand was remade into another mini-series, starring James Marsden, while The Outsider landed at HBO as a slow-burn TV series. In 2021, Lisey’s Story was turned into a mini series for Apple TV starring Julienne Moore. Three years later, in 2024, Salem’s Lot, which was previously made into TV shows in both 1979 and 2004, received its first film adaptation.
King’s work has seen a myriad of adaptations in 2025, including the films The Monkey and The Life of Chuck, based on the short stories of the same name. In September, his Bachman novel The Long Walk made it to the big screen, with Mark Hamill playing the authoritarian antagonist the Major. In November of this year, Glen Powell is set to star in the remake of The Running Man.
Band
Outside of writing, King is a big music fan. He sang and played guitar in a band called Rock Bottom Remainders with fellow authors Dave Barry, Barbara Kingsolver, and Amy Tan, among others. The group, which was active from 1992 to 2012, performed at a number of venues across the country, including the Miami Book Fair and New York City’s Webster Hall. They also played at several charity events over the years.
Addiction Issues
At the height of his career, King began abusing drugs and alcohol in the 1970s. At the time, he would write sober during the day and edit at night when he was inebriated. Eventually, King started using cocaine and would show up to his son’s baseball games with a drink in hand. “As time went on, I started to fumble a lot of the balls,” he told The Guardian in September 2013. “I had a busy public life and a lot of those things got a bit ragged by the end.” In the late 1980s, however, King’s family staged an intervention, which led him to get the help he needed. He has now been sober for around 36 years.
Car Accident
In June 1999, King was struck by the driver of a van while out on a walk in Maine. The accident left him severely injured, sustaining a gash on his scalp, broken ribs, and a punctured lung. He also fractured his right hip and his leg was broken in several places. After three weeks in the hospital, King returned home in July but later returned for another surgery. It took him a while to recover, but the crash didn’t stop him from writing for very long. With the help of his wife, Tabitha, he returned to his work by the end of the month.
Wife Tabitha King and Children
King is married to novelist Tabitha King. The couple first met at the University of Maine in 1969 while working in the school’s library. They married in January 1971. Stephen and Tabitha share three children together. They welcomed their first child, Naomi, in June 1970, who is now a reverend. Their son, Joe, who writes under the pen name Joe Hill and is a lauded horror-fiction writer in his own right, was born in June 1972. The Kings had their youngest, Owen, in February 1977. He is also a writer whose first collection of stories was published in 2005.
Tabitha has always been fully supportive of Stephen’s writing career. From early on in their marriage, she encouraged him to pursue his passion, reading his drafts to give him feedback and work extra shifts to help support their family. Following his 1999 car accident, which left him seriously injured, Tabitha set up a makeshift desk in their home so he could continue writing from his wheelchair.
“Tabby always knew what I was supposed to be doing, and she believed that I would succeed at it,” he said during his acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003.
To date, King and his wife have been married for more than 54 years. They currently divide their time between Maine and Florida.
Net Worth
As of September 2025, King has an estimated net worth of $500 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth.
Quotes
- [French is] the language that turns dirt into romance.
- We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
- As a writer, I've always been confrontational. I've never been cool, I've never been calculating.
- There are plenty of people who have got lots of talent. This world is lousy with talent. The idea is to work that talent and try to get to be the best person that you can, given the limits of the talent that God gave you—or fate, or genetics or whatever name you want to put on it.
- I’ve been typed as a horror writer, but I never saw myself that way.
- Creativity can’t happen without sentience, and there are now arguments that some AIs are indeed sentient...If that is true now or in the future, then creativity might be possible. I view this possibility with a certain dreadful fascination.
- One of the challenges when you’ve been around as long as I have and you think you’ve explored all the corners of the room, you have to say to yourself, ‘What are the things that really concern me? What are the things that I care about?’
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