3 AMANAH 2010: Stephen King

Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine. He is the son of Nellie Ruth (nee Pillsbury) and Donald Edwin King. When King was only a couple years old, his father who was at the time working as a merchant seaman, had left the family under the pretense of "going to buy a pack of cigarettes," leaving King's mother Nellie, to handle their children which included King's adopted Brother David. This change had sometimes put her under great financial strain.

After that, the family moved to De Pere, Wisconsin; Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Stratford, Connecticut. The family returned to Durham, Maine when King was eleven where Nellie Ruth cared for her parents until they were whisked away by the peaceful hands of death. After that, Nellie took on the profession of a caterer in a local residential facility for the mentally disabled. As a child, King apparently witnessed one of his friends being struck and killed by a train, although he has no memory of the event. His family told him that after leaving home to play with the boy, King returned speechless and seemingly in shock. Only later on did the family learn of the boy's death. Some commentator has suggested that this event may have psychologically inspired some of King's darker works, but King himself has dismissed the idea. I on the other hand do agree with the commentator on this issue.

King attended Durham Elementary School and graduated from Lisbon Falls HIgh School in Lisbon Fallls, Maine. He shows an early interest in horror as an avid reader of EC's horror comics, including Tales from the Crypt. He then started contributing articles to Dave's Rag, the newspaper published by his brother and later began selling stories to his friends.

From 1966, King studied English at the University of Maine, then graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Science in English. He wrote a column for the student newspaper, The Maine Campus and the title was "Steve King's Garbage Truck". He took odd jobs to pay for his studies and also took part in a writing workshop organized by Burton Hatlen, an American literary scholar and professor at the University of Maine. He sold his first professional story, "The Glass Floor", to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967.

After leaving the university, King gained a certificate to teach high school but failed to find a teaching post immediately, initially supplemented his laboring wage by selling short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier. The collection of Night Shift has been published many of these early stories by King. In 1971, King married Tabitha Spruce, they was met at the University's Fogler Library. She was an American author and also a activist. That fall, King was hired as a teacher at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. Later on, he continued to contribute short stories to magazines and worked on ideas for novel.

In the 1973 on Mother's Day, King's novel Carrie was accepted by publishing house Doubleday. King became so discouraged when trying to develop the idea of a girl with psyhic powers into a novel but he thought it was childish and his wife encouraged him to finish it. King and his family then went to sourthen Maine because of his mother failing health. At this moment, he began writing a book and finally titled Salem's Lot that wass published in 1975. HIs mother died of uterine cancer in 1974 and his Auntie Emrine read the novel to her before she died. King was drunk when delivering the eulogy at his mother's funeral.

After his mother's death, King and his family had moved to Boulder, Colorado. In 1975, the family returned to western Maine and King completed his fourth novel titled The Stand, published in 1978. In 1977, the family with the addition of his third child, second son, Owen Philips, traveled to England, then return to Maine and King began teaching writing at the University of Maine. King kept his primary residence in Maine ever since.

In the summer of 1999, King was reading a book while walking and was distrated by a unrestrained dog moving in the back of his minivan, struck King, who landed in a depression in the ground about 14 feet from the pavement of Route 5. King said that it was his fault because he was walking facing traffic. His injuries - a collasped right lung, multiple fractures of his right leg, scalp laceration and a broken hip kept him at CMMC almost three weeks. Two years later, King suffered severe pnuemonia as a result of his lung been punctured in the accident.

"I'm writing but I'm writing at a much slower pace than previously and I think that if I come up with something really, really good, I will be perfecting willing to publish it because that still feels like the final act of the creative process, publishing it so people can read it and you can get feedbackand people can talk about it with each other and with you, the writer, but the force of my invention has slowed down alot over the years and that's as ti should be" said King lastly.

Pictures of some of his books :-