Ruth King's parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had grown handicapped due to old age, and her sisters encouraged her to take up the physical care of the elderly pair. Other family members contributed a little house in Durham as well as financial assistance. Mrs.
King found employment in the kitchens of Pineland, a neighboring residential home for the mentally ill, when Stephen's grandparents died. Stephen attended Durham Grammar School and subsequently Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966.
From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he published a weekly column for THE MAINE CAMPUS and was involved in student politics, sitting on the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, coming from a conservative viewpoint that the Vietnam War was illegal. He earned a B.A.
in 1970 from the University of Maine at Orono. in English and certified to teach on the high school level. He and Tabitha Spruce married in January 1971, after a draft board examination declared him 4-F due to high blood pressure, restricted vision, flat feet, and perforated eardrums.
Tabitha and he met in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University of Maine in Orono, where they were both students.
Because Stephen was unable to find work as an educator almost once, the Kings made do with his salary as a worker at an industrial laundry and her school loan and savings, with the odd boost from a short story sale to men's magazines. In 1967, Stephen sold his first professional short story ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories.
He continued to sell tales to men's magazines during the early years of his marriage. Many of them were eventually collected in Night Shift or published in other anthologies. Stephen began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, a public high school in Hampden, Maine, in the autumn of 1971.
He continued to write short tales and work on novels in the evenings and on weekends. Doubleday & Co. accepted the novel Carrie for publication in the spring of 1973. On Mother's Day of that year, Stephen heard from Bill Thompson, his new editor at Doubleday, that a large paperback sale would allow him to stop teaching and write full-time.
Because Stephen's mother's health was failing, the Kings relocated their growing family to southern Maine at the end of the summer of 1973.
In a small room in the garage of his vacation cottage on Sebago Lake in North Windham during the winter, Stephen penned his next-published work, initially named Second Coming and then Jerusalem's Lot until it became 'Salem's Lot. Stephen's mother died of cancer at the age of 59 during this time period. Carrie debuted in the spring of 1974.
The Kings departed Maine that fall for Boulder, Colorado. They resided there for just over a year, during which Stephen created The Shining, which is set in Colorado. When the Kings returned to Maine in the summer of 1975, they bought a house in the Lakes Region in western Maine.
Stephen finished The Stand at that house, which is situated in Boulder as well. Bridgton was also the setting for The Dead Zone. In 1977, the Kings spent three months of a planned year-long trip in England before returning home in mid-December, having purchased a new house in Center Lovell, Maine.
After spending a summer there, the Kings relocated to Orrington, near Bangor, so Stephen could teach creative writing at the University of Maine in Orono. In the spring of 1979, the Kings returned to Center Lovell. The Kings bought a second home in Bangor in 1980, keeping the Center Lovell house as a vacation property.
Stephen and Tabitha now spend the winters in Florida and the rest of the year in Bangor and Center Lovell. Naomi Rachel, Joe Hill, and Owen Phillip are the Kings' three children, and they have four grandkids. Stephen is of Scots-Irish descent, measures 6'4" tall, and weighs around 200 pounds.
He has blue eyes, light complexion, and thick, black hair ,with a touch of white most evident in his beard, which he wears occasionally between the end of the World Series and the start of baseball spring training in Florida. In other seasons, he may sport a moustache. He's been wearing glasses since he was a youngster.
He has used some of his undergraduate dramatic society experience in cameo roles in several of his film adaptations, as well as a tiny part in a George Romero film, Knightriders. Joe Hill King also starred in the 1982 horror film Creepshow.
In 1985, Stephen made his directing debut as well as penning the script for the film Maximum Overdrive (based on his short story "Trucks"). Stephen and Tabitha give scholarships to local high school students and support a variety of other local and national causes.
Stephen received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003 and the National Medal of Arts in 2014.
