Stephen King
Who is Stephen King?
Which are some of Stephen King’s famous novels?
Which of Stephen King’s books have been adapted into movies and television shows?
Why is Stephen King considered an important figure in modern literature?
News •
Stephen King (born September 21, 1947, Portland, Maine, U.S.) is an American novelist and short-story writer whose books are credited with reviving the genre of horror fiction in the late 20th century. King began publishing novels in the 1970s, starting with his harrowing teen angst classic Carrie. By the next decade, his works had virtually dominated the horror genre. Blending the macabre with the realistic, he became an internationally best-selling author, and many of his novels and short stories were adapted into iconic films. For all his success, King has been modest about his status as “the King of Horror,” once writing, “I have times when I feel as if I planted a modest packet of words and grew some kind of magic beanstalk…or a runaway garden of books.”
- Name: Stephen Edwin King; also publishes as Richard Bachman; nicknamed the King of Horror
- Notable books: Carrie (1974), The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978), The Dark Tower series (1982–2012), It (1986), Misery (1987)
Early life
King is the second of two sons born to Donald and Nellie Ruth (née Pillsbury) King. His parents separated when he was very young. King and his elder brother, David, moved several times while growing up, living near their father’s family in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and in Stratford, Connecticut, before their mother moved them back to Maine when King was 11 years old. After graduating from high school in 1966, King attended the University of Maine, where he wrote for the school newspaper. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and a teaching certificate in 1970. The following year he married the writer Tabitha Spruce, whom he met in college.
While writing short stories, King earned a meager income by teaching and working in an industrial laundry, among other jobs. He had sold his first story in 1967 to a mystery fiction magazine, after which many of his stories were published in men’s magazines.
Breakthrough with Carrie
His first published novel, Carrie (1974), is about a tormented teenage girl gifted with telekinetic powers. Its inspiration was sparked by King’s memories of his brief stint working as a janitor in a high school and from an article he had read in Life magazine that proposed that girls might be susceptible to having powers of telekinesis at the time of their first menstruation. The novel’s protagonist, a misfit named Carrie White, was created as a composite of two girls whom King knew when he was growing up.
After drafting three pages of the novel, King had second thoughts about his idea and threw the pages away. His wife, however, rescued the pages from the trash, read them, and encouraged him to keep going. Carrie was an immediate popular success and was adapted into a film for the first time in 1976 (directed by Brian De Palma and starring Sissy Spacek as Carrie). Many other versions have appeared as television movies, feature films, and a musical play. In 2026 King served as executive producer of a TV series adaptation (created by Mike Flanagan) that updates the story to the 21st century.
The king of horror fiction
Carrie was the first of many novels in which King blended horror, the macabre, fantasy, and science fiction. Among such works are ’Salem’s Lot (1975; TV miniseries 1979 and 2004); The Shining (1977; film 1980; TV miniseries 1997); The Stand (1978; TV miniseries 1994 and 2020–21); and The Dead Zone (1979; film 1983; TV series 2002–07). The Shining, a horror novel set in a haunted Colorado hotel in the winter offseason, was inspired by King’s one-night stay in a similar hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, during a time when the Kings were living in nearby Boulder. The Stand also mostly features a Colorado setting, though many of King’s novels, including Carrie, are set in Maine, his home state.
King’s books were so popular by the 1980s that they were virtually guaranteed to be adapted into feature films, TV movies, or miniseries. That decade he published Firestarter (1980; films 1984 and 2022); Cujo (1981; film 1983); The Running Man (1982; film 1987); Christine (1983; film 1983); Thinner (1984; film 1996); It (1986; TV miniseries 1990; films 2017 and 2019); Misery (1987; film 1990); The Tommyknockers (1987; TV miniseries 1993); and The Dark Half (1989; film 1993).
The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.
SUBSCRIBE
By the early 1990s King’s books had sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, and his name had become synonymous with the genre of horror fiction. In the 1990s and first decades of the 21st century, he published Needful Things (1991; film 1993); Dolores Claiborne (1993; film 1995); The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999); Dreamcatcher (2001; film 2003); Cell (2006; film 2016); Lisey’s Story (2006; TV miniseries 2021); Duma Key (2008); Under the Dome (2009; TV series 2013–15); 11/22/63 (2011; TV miniseries 2016); Joyland (2013); Doctor Sleep (2013; film 2019), a sequel to The Shining; Revival (2014); The Outsider (2018; TV miniseries 2020); The Institute (2019); Later (2021); and Fairy Tale (2022).
Themes
In his books, King explores almost every terror-producing theme imaginable, from vampires, rabid dogs, deranged killers, and a pyromaniac to ghosts, extrasensory perception and telekinesis, biological warfare, and even a malevolent automobile. In his later fiction, exemplified by Dolores Claiborne, King has departed from the horror genre to provide sharply detailed psychological portraits of his protagonists, many of them women, who confront difficult and challenging circumstances.
Though sometimes disparaged as undisciplined and inelegant, King’s books show him to be a talented storyteller who deploys realistic detail, forceful plotting, and an undoubted ability to involve and scare the reader. His work consistently addresses such themes as the potential for politics and technology to disrupt or even destroy an individual human life. Obsession—the forms it can assume and its power to wreck individuals, families, and whole communities—is a recurring theme in King’s fiction, driving the narratives of Christine, Misery, and Needful Things.
Richard Bachman novels
King published several early novels, among them the The Running Man and Thinner, under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Thinner included a bogus author’s photo (of Richard Manuel, a friend of King’s literary agent) and a dedication to Bachman’s “wife,” Claudia Inez Bachman. After admitting to being Richard Bachman, King released a collection of the first four Bachman novels, The Bachman Books (1985), under his own name. The collection also includes his essay “Why I Was Bachman,” in which he wrote, “I think that all novelists are inveterate role-players and it was fun to be someone else for a while.” In the essay, King also explained that the Bachman books were a compromise with his publishers, who thought that the prolific writer was saturating the market. King later published The Regulators (1996) and Blaze (2007) under Bachman’s name.
The Dark Tower and other serial novels
King wrote a serial novel, The Dark Tower, whose first installment, The Gunslinger, appeared in 1982. The eighth—and final—volume, The Wind Through the Keyhole, was published in 2012. The series centers on a post-apocalyptic parallel universe called Mid-World. Many fans consider it to be King’s best work. He has cited his influences for the series as Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novels The Lord of the Rings, film director Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, and Arthurian legend. A film adaptation of the series was released in 2017.
King’s Mr. Mercedes (2014), Finders Keepers (2015), and End of Watch (2016) form a trilogy of hard-boiled crime novels centering on retired detective Bill Hodges. The trilogy was adapted into a TV series in 2017–19, starring Brendan Gleeson as Hodges. King also wrote a series with horror novelist Peter Straub, beginning with The Talisman in 1984; its sequel, Black House, appeared in 2002. Like The Dark Tower books, the series is set in a parallel medieval universe, this time called the Territories, and many readers noticed other similarities between the two alternate worlds. Straub died in 2022, but King continued the series with Other Worlds Than These (2026; credited to both King and Straub), which confirmed that the Territories and Mid-World are one and the same.
Short fiction
King’s short-story collection Night Shift contains several pieces that became classic horror films—or campy cult favorites—including “Children of the Corn,” “Graveyard Shift,” and “The Lawnmower Man.”
King’s short fiction has been collected in such volumes as Night Shift (1978), Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993; TV miniseries 2006), Hearts in Atlantis (1999; film 2001), Just After Sunset (2008), and The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015). His collection You Like It Darker was released in 2024. Among its stories is “The Answer Man,” which King began writing in the 1970s but did not finish because he did not think the story was worthwhile. As King told NPR, his nephew found the story while clearing out King’s writing space to archive the author’s unpublished and unfinished works, and he encouraged King to complete and publish the story.
The novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, which was published in Different Seasons (1982), inspired the Academy Award-nominated film The Shawshank Redemption (1994), starring Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins.
Films and TV work
Numerous TV and film adaptations have been made of King’s works, and they involved such notable directors as John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, George A. Romero, and Rob Reiner. While King often had little participation in these projects, he wrote the TV miniseries The Stand (1994), The Shining (1997), and Lisey’s Story (2021). For The Stand and The Shining, King received Emmy Award nominations for outstanding miniseries. He also penned several motion-picture screenplays, including Maximum Overdrive (1986), which he directed.
On Writing and nontraditional publishing
King explored both his own career and the craft of writing in On Writing (2000), a book he completed while recovering from severe injuries he had received after being struck by a car. He has also experimented with different forms of book distribution. The Plant: Zenith Rising was released in 2000 solely as an e-book, distributed via the Internet, with readers asked but not required to pay for it. The novella UR was made available in 2009 only to users of the Kindle electronic reading device. The short story “Drunken Fireworks” was released in 2015 as an audiobook prior to its print publication.
Personal life and honors
King and his wife, Tabitha King, have a daughter, Naomi King, who is a Unitarian Universalist minister, and two sons, Joe Hill and Owen King, who are novelists. With Owen King he wrote Sleeping Beauties (2017), in which women become wrapped in cocoons when they fall asleep.
In 2002 King received a lifetime achievement award from the Horror Writers Association. He has received two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, which also named him a Grand Master, its highest honor, in 2007.
King received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003 and the National Medal of Arts in 2015. Three years later he received the PEN America Literary Service Award.