Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. His father left the family when King was two years old, and he was raised in modest circumstances by his mother, Nellie Ruth King, moving between relatives’ homes in Indiana, Connecticut and Maine before the family settled in Durham, Maine. He developed an early love of horror and suspense through radio dramas, comic books and pulp paperbacks, and went on to study English at the University of Maine at Orono, graduating in 1970. It was there that he met fellow student and writer Tabitha Spruce, whom he married in 1971. (Britannica)

After college, King struggled to support his young family, working as a high school English teacher in Hampden, Maine, and taking shifts at an industrial laundry, while writing short stories for men’s magazines in the evenings. He had sold his first professional story in 1967, but for years his income remained thin. King has said he nearly gave up on his novel Carrie, throwing an early draft in the trash before his wife Tabitha retrieved the pages and encouraged him to finish it. (History.com)

Doubleday accepted Carrie for hardcover publication in the spring of 1973, and the book was released on April 5, 1974. The real financial turning point came when the paperback rights were sold to New American Library for roughly 400,000 dollars, of which King’s contractual half share came to about 200,000 dollars before taxes, a life-changing sum that allowed him to quit teaching and write full time. The success of Carrie, followed quickly by ‘Salem’s Lot and The Shining, established him as a major new voice in American fiction. (Parade)

Over a career spanning more than five decades, King has published more than 65 novels along with hundreds of short stories, novellas and works of nonfiction, several under the pen name Richard Bachman. In 2003 he received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2014 President Barack Obama presented him with the National Medal of Arts for storytelling that “thrilled readers around the world.” (National Endowment for the Arts)

King’s books have sold more than 350 million copies worldwide and have been translated into dozens of languages, making him one of the best-selling fiction authors in history. Dozens of his novels and stories have been adapted for film and television, including Carrie, The Shining, Stand By Me, Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, It and the HBO series The Outsider and Max’s IT: Welcome to Derry, adaptations that have introduced his work to generations of viewers who may never have read the source novels. (Wikipedia)

King has done little conventional celebrity endorsement work over his career, and has said his one experience with it left him wary of more. In 1986 he appeared in an American Express “Do You Know Me?” television commercial, a campaign that paired well-known names with lesser-known faces. King has said the ad backfired on him personally, since it made his face instantly recognizable and cost him the anonymity he had valued as a working writer, a regret he has repeated in interviews for decades since. (SlashFilm)

Beyond writing, King and Tabitha King owned Zone Corporation, a small Bangor, Maine radio group built around WZON and sister station WKIT-FM, which King purchased in the 1980s partly to keep a local rock and news presence on the air in his hometown. The company operated for decades before King shut down WZON and WZLO at the end of 2024 amid ongoing financial losses, with the stations sold to a new owner in 2025. He has also run Philtrum Press, a small imprint that has published limited-edition King titles since the 1980s. (Wikipedia)

King’s best-known residence is a red Victorian mansion at 47 West Broadway in Bangor, Maine, distinguished by its wrought-iron bat and gargoyle gate, which he and Tabitha have owned since 1980. In recent years the family has converted the Bangor property into a home for King’s personal archive, with an adjoining building set up to host visiting writers in residence, while King and Tabitha now spend most of their time at a Gulf-front home on Casey Key near Sarasota, Florida, purchased for a reported 8.9 million dollars in 2001. (CBS News Boston)