Stephen King

Stephen King

BORN21 September 1947

OCCUPATIONAuthor

KNOWN FORCarrie; The Shining; It; 'Salem's Lot

STATUSLiving

Stephen Edwin King (born 21 September 1947) is an American author best known for his contributions to horror, supernatural fiction, suspense and fantasy. Often called the "King of Horror," he is one of the best-selling fiction writers of all time, with more than 350 million copies of his books sold worldwide and dozens of his novels and stories adapted for film and television.

Although his stories are fictional, King's work is relevant to The Vault for two distinct reasons. First, his novels and short stories explore themes central to this archive — ghosts and hauntings, psychic ability, possession, precognition and folkloric monsters — and have done more than almost any other single body of work to shape how the paranormal is imagined in modern popular culture. Second, several of his best-known books were directly inspired by real places and real events, most famously a single night he and his wife spent at a hotel with its own reputation for being haunted.

Early life

King was born in Portland, Maine on 21 September 1947, the second son of Donald Edwin King and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. His father left the family when King was a toddler, and he and his older brother David were raised by their mother, who moved the family between relatives in several states before settling in Durham, Maine. As a child, King developed an early fascination with horror through comic books, monster films and the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe.

He studied English at the University of Maine in Orono, graduating in 1970, and it was there that he met fellow student and aspiring writer Tabitha Spruce; the two married in January 1971. In the early 1970s the couple lived in a rented double-wide trailer outside Bangor, and King taught English at Hampden Academy while writing short stories at night. Money was tight enough that Tabitha worked shifts at a Dunkin' Donuts to help make ends meet.

While drafting an early version of what became his first novel, Carrie, King grew frustrated with the story — he later said he found writing convincingly from a teenage girl's perspective uncomfortable — and threw the crumpled first pages in the wastebasket. Tabitha retrieved them, read what he had written, and convinced him the story had potential and that she could help him get some of the domestic and school detail right. He finished the manuscript on her encouragement.

Career

Carrie was published by Doubleday in 1974 after King sold the hardback rights for a modest advance; the subsequent paperback sale, for $400,000, allowed him to leave teaching and write full-time. The novel — about a bullied teenager with telekinetic powers — established several elements that would recur throughout his career: a small-town New England setting, a protagonist with a hidden or emerging supernatural ability, and horror grounded in recognisable adolescent or domestic cruelty.

A remarkably prolific run followed: 'Salem's Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978), The Dead Zone (1979), Firestarter (1980), Cujo (1981), Pet Sematary (1983), It (1986) and Misery (1987) were all published within roughly a decade, alongside the beginning of his Dark Tower fantasy series, which he continued to write across three further decades. King has continued publishing at a similar pace ever since, including later novels such as 11/22/63 (2011) and Doctor Sleep (2013), a direct sequel to The Shining.

Between 1977 and 1985, King published several novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, partly because publishers of the era discouraged authors from releasing more than one book per year under their own name, and partly, King later said, to test whether his success was down to talent or simply to his name recognition. The pseudonym was uncovered by a Washington, D.C. bookstore clerk, Steve Brown, who noticed stylistic similarities between Bachman's Thinner and King's own work and traced a Library of Congress filing that named King as the copyright holder. Brown contacted King's publisher in January 1985; King called Brown directly and the connection was confirmed in the press the following month.

King has received numerous honours for his body of work, including the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2003) and the National Medal of Arts, awarded by President Barack Obama in 2015.

The Stanley Hotel and the origins of The Shining

The best-documented real-world paranormal connection in King's career is the origin of The Shining. On 30 October 1974, King and Tabitha checked into the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, on the last night before the hotel closed for the winter season. With the staff already winding down operations, the couple found themselves the only guests, dining alone in an empty restaurant to the sound of recorded orchestral music playing over the sound system.

That night, in room 217, King had a vivid nightmare in which his young son was being chased through the hotel's corridors by a live fire hose. He woke, lit a cigarette, and by the time it was finished had the outline of a ghost-story novel set in a grand, isolated hotel worked out in his head. The finished novel gave its fictional Overlook Hotel a room number, 217, taken directly from the room King and Tabitha had stayed in.

The Stanley itself had an established reputation for being haunted well before King's stay, built up around its founder, F. O. Stanley, and his wife Flora, whose ghost is said by staff and guests to still play the hotel's music room piano. The hotel has since leaned into the connection, marketing room 217 to guests and hosting annual events tied to the book and its 1980 film adaptation directed by Stanley Kubrick — although the film's exterior shots were actually filmed at Oregon's Timberline Lodge, not at the Stanley itself.

The 1999 accident

On 19 June 1999, King was struck by a minivan while walking along a road near his summer home in North Lovell, Maine. The driver, Bryan Smith, said he had been distracted by a dog moving around inside the vehicle; the impact broke King's glasses, which were later found on the front seat of the van. King suffered a collapsed lung, four broken ribs, a fractured hip and a lower leg broken in at least nine places, and spent three weeks in hospital undergoing five operations.

Smith pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of driving to endanger and received a six-month sentence. He was found dead in his trailer in September 2000, of an accidental overdose, on what was coincidentally King's 53rd birthday. King later wrote about the accident and his lengthy recovery in his memoir On Writing, and incorporated a fictionalised version of the crash into the later volumes of his Dark Tower series.

Real-world inspirations behind his fiction

Beyond the Stanley Hotel, several of King's other novels trace back to specific real incidents. Cujo (1981), about a friendly St. Bernard driven into a rabid, murderous rage, grew out of a 1977 encounter in which King brought his motorcycle to a repair shop and was attacked by the mechanic's dog, a large St. Bernard named Bowser, after being told the animal was friendly; the mechanic pulled the dog off with a socket wrench before King was seriously hurt. The incident stayed with him, and he later said he began wondering what would happen "if the dog was really crazy" rather than simply mean.

Paranormal connections and views

King's fiction returns repeatedly to subjects documented throughout The Vault, including hauntings, psychic ability, premonition, possession and folkloric monsters, and his work has done a great deal to shape how these concepts are represented in modern popular culture — even though King himself has always been careful to describe his novels as fiction rather than as documentation of real paranormal claims.

On his own views, King has spoken publicly and at some length about his fascination with death, belief and the unknown, without staking out a firm, simple position. In a 2013 NPR interview, he recalled a conversation with Stanley Kubrick during production of the 1980 film of The Shining, in which Kubrick argued that anyone who tells a ghost story is "basically an optimist," since a ghost story presupposes that some part of a person continues after death; King said he pushed back by asking Kubrick what he made of hell, to which Kubrick replied that he didn't believe in it. King has cited the exchange as capturing his own approach to the subject — genuinely curious about the possibility of an afterlife, rather than either a believer or a straightforward sceptic.

Supernatural themes in his work

Ghosts and hauntings

Haunted locations recur throughout King's bibliography. The Shining follows the Torrance family through a winter as caretakers of the isolated, supernaturally malevolent Overlook Hotel. The short story "1408" (1999) follows a sceptical writer who checks into a hotel room with a lethal reputation, and was adapted into the 2007 film 1408, starring John Cusack.

Psychic phenomena

Several of King's protagonists display abilities studied within Parapsychology: Carrie White's telekinesis in Carrie; Danny Torrance's "shining," a form of clairvoyance and telepathy, in The Shining and its sequel Doctor Sleep; and John Smith's precognition, triggered by a car accident and coma, in The Dead Zone (1979).

Monsters and unknown entities

King has also written extensively about folkloric and invented monsters, including the ancient, shapeshifting entity of It (1986), the vampiric infestation of a small Maine town in 'Salem's Lot (1975), and the resurrected, malevolent dead of Pet Sematary (1983).

Adaptations and cultural impact

King's influence extends well beyond the page: by some counts, more film and television adaptations have been made of his work than of any other living author. Notable adaptations exploring paranormal or supernatural themes include The Shining (1980), Carrie (1976, remade 2013), Pet Sematary (1989, remade 2019), It (1990 miniseries; 2017 and 2019 films), The Stand (1994 miniseries; 2020 series), The Mist (2007) and 1408 (2007). His stories have introduced multiple generations of audiences to ideas about hauntings, psychic ability and unexplained phenomena, and his style is still cited directly by later horror productions — the short-lived series 666 Park Avenue, for instance, was pitched by its own showrunner as "absolutely Stephen King influenced."

Personal life

King and Tabitha King, herself a published novelist, live in Bangor, Maine, and have three children, including the novelist Joe Hill, who has built his own career writing horror and dark fantasy fiction.

Vault Profile Assessment

VAULT PROFILE ASSESSMENT

CATEGORY

Author / Cultural Figure

VAULT RELEVANCE

High

CONNECTION

Ghosts and hauntings, psychic phenomena, folkloric monsters, and a directly documented real-world haunted-hotel origin story behind one of his best-known novels

ASSESSMENT

Stephen King is the most commercially significant writer of supernatural fiction of the modern era. While his novels are fiction, they have shaped popular understanding of paranormal folklore more than almost any other single body of work, and the real Stanley Hotel stay behind The Shining gives his connection to The Vault an unusually direct, verifiable basis.

See also

• H. P. Lovecraft
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Bram Stoker
• Ghosts and Hauntings
• Parapsychology
• Telepathy
• Psychokinesis

External links

• StephenKing.com
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Stephen King
• The Stanley Hotel — Room 217