He published several books per year for much of the 1980s and '90s.
He came up with the alias after seeing a novel by Richard Stark on his desk (actually a pseudonym used by Donald Westlake) coupled with what he heard playing on his record player at the time - "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet," by Bachman Turner Overdrive.Īlthough many of King's works were made into film or TV adaptations - Cujo and Firestarter were released for the big screen in 1983 and '84 respectively, while It debuted as a miniseries in 1990 - 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.įor a good portion of his career, King wrote novels and stories at a breakneck speed. Four early novels - Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981) and The Running Man (1982) - were published under the moniker because of King's concern that the public wouldn't accept more than one book from an author within a year.
While making novels about vicious, rabid dogs and sewer-dwelling monsters - as seen in Cujo and IT, respectively - King published several books as Richard Bachman. More popular novels soon followed, including Salem's Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), Firestarter (1980), Cujo (1981) and IT (1986). It was later adapted for the big screen with Sissy Spacek as the title character.
The book became a huge success after it was published the following year, allowing him to devote himself to writing full time. In 1973, King sold his first novel, Carrie, the tale of a tormented teen who gets revenge on her peers. It was that year that he also married fellow writer Tabitha Spruce. King took a job in a laundry and continued to write stories in his spare time until late 1971, when he began working as an English educator at Hampden Academy. After graduating with a degree in English in 1970, he tried to find a position as a teacher but had no luck at first. While in school, King published his first short story, which appeared in Startling Mystery Stories. There he wrote for the school's newspaper and served in its student government. King stayed close to home for college, attending the University of Maine at Orono. There he graduated from Lisbon Falls High School in 1966. King later moved back to Maine with his mother and brother. His parents, Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King, split up when he was very young, and he and his brother David divided their time between Indiana and Connecticut for several years. King is recognized as one of the most famous and successful horror writers of all time. Incidents and events that, in turn, lead to him writing some of his most famous books.Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. Whilst - as most writers will tell you - an idea for a novel can just spring up out of nowhere with no real context involved, many of Stephen King's works have emerged as a result of specific incidents or events that happened to the author in person. Still, one question that often occupies the mind of a Stephen King fan - given their sheer audacity or outright weirdness - is: "Where does he get his ideas?"
His novels are bold, dense and outright unparalleled in their sheer readability. Truth is, Stephen King is popular for a reason - his power to grip and mesmerise and shock the reader renders him as a something akin to a modern day Charles Dickens. There are those who are quick to write off Stephen King as "non-literary," but those people are just snobs (many of whom haven't actually sat down to read a Stephen King novel).
You can't deride a man who has written not one, or two, or ten great novels, but countless works of literary brilliance spanning multiple decades - and he's still putting out all the stops. Stephen King is one of the greatest novelists of all-time.