Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine. After his parents’ separation when he was a toddler, he and his older brother David were raised by their mother. They lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where Stephen’s father’s side of the family lived. Later, they moved to Stratford, Connecticut, where Stephen spent most of his childhood. He frequently visited his mother’s side of the family in Malden, Massachusetts, and Pownal, Maine.
Around his 11th anniversary, Stephen’s mom moved to Durham, Maine, along with Stephen and his brother to take care of her parents, who were too old to take care of themselves. Stephen’s school days were spent at Durham Grammar School. He then attended Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. He went to college at the University of Maine at Orono, during which, in his sophomore year, he wrote a weekly column for THE MAINE CAMPUS. During his college years, he opposed the war in Vietnam, declaring it unconstitutional.
After his graduation in 1970, Stephen acquired a Bachelor of Science in English and immediately qualified to teach at the high school level. As a student, Stephen worked at the Folger Library on the University of Maine at Orono’s campus. While working, he met a fellow employee named Tabitha Spruce, whom he married in January 1971. Stephen King’s first publication was a short story he wrote and sent to a men’s magazine. This is where his first profit from writing came from. Throughout the few years after his graduation, he wrote stories and sold them to men’s magazines. All of these short stories would later be gathered into a collection known as the “Night Shift” collection.
In the fall of ’71, King was hired as a teacher at Hampden Academy, a public high school in Hampden, Maine. He still found time to write short stories and work on his novel on the weekends and evenings. King’s first big break came in the spring of 1973 when Doubleday & Co. accepted Stephen King’s novel, Carrie. After learning from his new editor, Bill Thompson, that a major paperback sale would make him financially secure enough to quit teaching, Stephen moved his now-growing family to southern Maine because of his grandmother’s ever-growing sickness. During the writing of Salem’s Lot, Stephen’s mother grew ill and died of cancer at the age of 59.
Carrie was published in the spring of 1974. During the fall of the same year, King moved his family to Boulder, Colorado. Stephen King wrote The Shining in the half-year they lived in Colorado. They then returned to Maine in the summer of 1975. It was in his new house that King finished writing The Stand, which was set back in Boulder. Stephen King eventually moved back to the area around his college so he could teach creative writing as a professor.
Bibliography:www.horrorking.comwww.stephenking.com
