Beginnings

In 1971, King worked as a teacher at Hampden Academy.

King sold his first professional short story, "The Glass Floor", to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967.^[1]

After graduating from the University of Maine, King earned a certificate to teach high school but, unable to find a teaching post immediately, he supplemented his laboring wage by selling short stories to magazines like Cavalier. Many of these early stories were republished in Night Shift (1978). In 1971, King was hired as an English teacher at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. He continued to contribute short stories to magazines and worked on ideas for novels.^[1] From 1966–1970, he wrote a draft of his dystopian novel The Long Walk and the anti-war novel Sword in the Darkness; only the former was published, in 1979.^[30]

1970s: Carrie to The Dead Zone

Portrait from the first edition of Carrie (1974)

Portrait from the first edition of The Shining (1977)

King recalls the origin of his debut novel, Carrie: "Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together." It began as a short story intended for Cavalier, but King tossed the first three pages in the trash. His wife Tabitha recovered them and said she wanted to know what happened next; he followed her advice and expanded it into a novel.^[31] She told him: "You've got something here. I really think you do."^[32] When Carrie was chosen for publication in 1973, King's phone was out of service. Doubleday editor William Thompson sent King a telegram which read: "Carrie Officially A Doubleday Book. $2,500 Advance Against Royalties. Congrats, Kid – The Future Lies Ahead, Bill."^[33] Per The Guardian, Carrie "is the story of Carrie White, a high-school student with latent—and then, as the novel progresses, developing—telekinetic powers. It's brutal in places, affecting in others (Carrie's relationship with her almost hysterically religious mother being a particularly damaged one), and gory in even more."^[34] The review of Carrie in The New York Times noted that "King does more than tell a story. He is a schoolteacher himself, and he gets into Carrie’s mind as well as into the minds of her classmates. He also knows a thing or two about symbolism—blood symbolism especially."^[35]

King was teaching Dracula to high school students and wondered what would happen if Old World vampires came to a small New England town. This was the germ of 'Salem's Lot, which King called "Peyton Place meets Dracula".^[36][37] In two interviews in the 1980s, King called it his favorite of his novels.^[38][39] (He now calls Lisey's Story his favorite of his novels.)^[21][40] King's mother died from uterine cancer around the time 'Salem's Lot was published.^[1] After his mother's death, King and his family moved to Boulder, Colorado. He paid a visit to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park which provided the basis for The Shining, about an alcoholic writer and his family taking care of a hotel for the winter.^[41] King's family returned to Auburn, Maine in 1975, where he completed The Stand, an apocalyptic novel about a pandemic and its aftermath. King recalls that it was the novel that took him the longest to write, and that it was "also the one my longtime readers still seem to like the best (there's something a little depressing about such a united opinion that you did your best work twenty years ago, but we won't go into that just now, thanks.)"^[42] In 1977, the Kings, with the addition of Owen Philip, their third and youngest child, traveled briefly to England. They returned to Maine that fall, and King began teaching creative writing at the University of Maine.^[43] The courses he taught on horror provided the basis for his first nonfiction book, Danse Macabre. In 1979, he published The Dead Zone, about an ordinary man gifted with second sight. It was the first of his novels to take place in Castle Rock, Maine.

1980s: Different Seasons to The Dark Half

In 1982, King published Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas with a more serious dramatic bent than the horror fiction for which he had become famous.^[44] Alan Cheuse wrote “Each of the first three novellas has its hypnotic moments, and the last one is a horrifying little gem.”^[45] Three of the four novellas were adapted as films: The Body as Stand by Me (1986);^[46] Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption as The Shawshank Redemption (1994);^[47] and Apt Pupil as the film of the same name (1998).^[48] The fourth, The Breathing Method, won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.^[49] King recalls "I got the best reviews in my life. And that was the first time that people thought, woah, this isn't really a horror thing."^[50]

King struggled with addiction throughout the decade and often wrote under the influence of drugs and alcohol; he says he "barely remembers writing" Cujo.^[51] In 1983, he published Christine, "A love triangle involving 17-year-old misfit Arnie Cunningham, his new girlfriend and a haunted 1958 Plymouth Fury."^[52] Later that year, he published Pet Sematary, which he had written in the late 1970s, when his family was living near a highway that "used up a lot of animals" as a neighbor put it. His daughter's cat was killed, and they buried it in a pet cemetery built by the local children. King imagined a burial ground beyond it that could bring the dead back to life, albeit imperfectly. He initially found it too disturbing to publish, but resurrected it to fulfill his contract with Doubleday.^[53]

In 1985, King published Skeleton Crew, a book of short fiction including "The Reach" and The Mist. He recalls: "I would be asked, 'What happened in your childhood that makes you want to write those terrible things?' I couldn't think of any real answer to that. And I thought to myself, 'Why don't you write a final exam on horror, and put in all the monsters that everyone was afraid of as a kid? Put in Frankenstein, the werewolf, the vampire, the mummy, the giant creatures that ate up New York in the old B movies. Put 'em all in there."^[54] These influences coalesced into It, about a shapeshifting monster that takes the form of its victims' fears and haunts the town of Derry, Maine. He said he thought he was done writing about monsters, and wanted to "bring on all the monsters one last time…and call it It."^[55] It won the August Derleth Award in 1987.^[56]

In 1987, he published the fantasy The Eyes of the Dragon, which he originally wrote for his daughter.^[57] That same year, he published Misery, about Paul Sheldon, a popular writer who is injured in a car wreck and held captive by Annie Wilkes, his self-described "number-one fan". King recalls that "Paul Sheldon turned out to be a good deal more resourceful than I initially thought, and his efforts to play Scheherazade and save his life gave me a chance to say some things about the redemptive power of writing I had long felt but never articulated."^[58] Misery shared the inaugural Bram Stoker Award with Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon.^[59] King says the novel was influenced by his experiences with addiction: "Annie was my drug problem, and she was my number-one fan. God, she never wanted to leave."^[20] Later in 1987 he published The Tommyknockers, "a forties-style science fiction tale" he says was influenced by his drug use. After the book was published, King's wife staged an intervention and he agreed to seek treatment for addiction.^[60] Two years later, he published The Dark Half, about an author whose literary alter-ego takes on a life of his own.^[61] In the author's note, King writes that "I am indebted to the late Richard Bachman."^[62]

Pseudonyms

King published five short novels—Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man (1982) and Thinner (1984)—under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. King explains: "I did that because back in the early days of my career there was a feeling in the publishing business that one book a year was all the public would accept...eventually the public got wise to this because you can change your name but you can't really disguise your style."^[63] Bachman's surname is derived from the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and his first name is a nod to Richard Stark, the pseudonym Donald E. Westlake used to publish his darker work.^[64] The Bachman books are grittier than King's usual fare; King called his alter-ego "Dark-toned, despairing...not a very nice guy." A Literary Guild member praised Thinner as "what Stephen King would write like if Stephen King could really write."^[26]

Richard Bachman was exposed as King's pseudonym by Steve Brown, a Washington, D.C. bookstore clerk who noticed stylistic similarities between King and Bachman and located publisher's records at the Library of Congress that named King as the author of Rage.^[65] King announced Bachman's death from "cancer of the pseudonym". King reflected that "Richard Bachman began his career not as a delusion but as a sheltered place where I could publish a few early books which I felt readers might like. Then he began to grow and come alive, as the creatures of a writer's imagination so frequently do... He took on his own reality, that's all, and when his cover was blown, he died.^[66] In 1996, when Desperation was released, the companion novel The Regulators was published as a "discovered manuscript" by Bachman. In 2006, King announced that he had discovered another Bachman novel, Blaze, which was published the following year. In fact, the original manuscript had been held at King's alma mater, the University of Maine, for many years and had been covered by numerous King experts. King rewrote the original 1973 manuscript for its publication.^[67]

King has used other pseudonyms. The short story "The Fifth Quarter" was published under the pseudonym John Swithen (the name of a character in Carrie) by Cavalier in April 1972.^[68] The story was reprinted in King's collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes in 1993 under his own name. In the introduction to Blaze, King claims that Bachman was the one using the Swithen pseudonym. Charlie the Choo-Choo: From the World of The Dark Tower was published in 2016 under the pseudonym Beryl Evans and illustrated by Ned Dameron.^[69] It is adapted from a fictional book central to the plot of King's The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands.^[70]

The Dark Tower

In the late 1970s, King began what became a series of interconnected stories about a lone gunslinger, Roland, who pursues the "Man in Black" in an alternate-reality universe that is a cross between J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth and the American Wild West as depicted by Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone in their spaghetti Westerns. The first of these stories, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, was initially published in five installments by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction under the editorship of Edward L. Ferman, from 1977 to 1981. The Gunslinger was continued as an eight-book epic series called The Dark Tower, whose books King wrote and published infrequently over four decades (1978-2012).^[71]

1990s: Four Past Midnight to Hearts in Atlantis

In 1990, King published Four Past Midnight, a collection of four novellas. In 1991, he published Needful Things, his first novel since achieving sobriety, billed as "The Last Castle Rock Story".^[20] In 1992, he published Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne, two novels about women loosely linked by a solar eclipse.^[72] The latter novel is narrated by the title character in an unbroken monologue; Mark Singer described it as "a morally riveting confession from the earthy mouth of a sixty-six-year-old Maine coastal-island native with a granite-hard life but not a grain of self-pity". King said he based the character of Claiborne on his mother.^[26]

In 1996, King published The Green Mile, the story of a death row inmate, as a serial novel. In 1998, King published of Bag of Bones, about a recently widowed novelist, billed as "A Haunted Love Story". The book was well-received, with The Denver Post calling it "the finest he's written".^[73] Charles de Lint wrote that it showed King's maturation as a writer: "He hasn't forsaken the spookiness and scares that have made him a brand name, but he uses them more judiciously now... The present-day King has far more insight into the human condition than did his younger self, and better yet, all the skills required to share it with us."^[74] Bag of Bones won the Bram Stoker and August Derleth Awards.^[75][76] In 1999, he published Hearts in Atlantis, a book of linked novellas and short stories about coming of age in the 1960s.

In 1999, King was hospitalized after being hit by a van. Reflecting on the incident, King wrote "it occurs to me that I have nearly been killed by a character out of one of my own novels. It's almost funny." He said his nurses were "told in no uncertain terms, don't make any Misery jokes".^[77]

2000s: On Writing to Under the Dome

Stephen King at the Harvard Book Store, June 6, 2005

In 2000, King published On Writing, a mix of memoir and style manual which The Wall Street Journal called "a one-of-a-kind classic".^[78] Later that year he published Riding the Bullet, "the world's first mass e-book, with more than 500,000 downloads". Inspired by its success, he began publishing an epistolary horror novel, The Plant, in online installments using the pay what you want method. He suggested readers pay $1 per installment, and said he'd only continue publishing if 75% of readers paid.^[79] When The Plant folded, the public assumed that King had abandoned the project because sales were unsuccessful, but King later said he had simply run out of stories.^[80] The unfinished novel is still available from King's official site, now free. He predicted that e-books would become 50% of the market "probably by 2013 and maybe by 2012". He added that: "Here's the thing—people tire of the new toys quickly."^[81] King wrote the first draft of Dreamcatcher (2001) with a notebook and a Waterman fountain pen, which he called "the world's finest word processor".^[82]

In 2002, King published From a Buick 8, a return to the territory of Christine.^[83] In 2005, he published the mystery The Colorado Kid for the Hard Case Crime imprint.^[84] In 2006, he published Cell, in which a mysterious signal broadcast over cell phones turns users into mindless killers. King noted in the book's introduction that he does not use cell phones.^[85] That same year, he published Lisey's Story, about the widow of a novelist. He calls it his favorite of his novels, because "I've always felt that marriage creates its own secret world, and only in a long marriage can two people at least approach real knowledge about each other. I wanted to write about that, and felt that I actually got close to what I really wanted to say."^[21] In 2007, King served as guest editor for the annual anthology The Best American Short Stories.^[86]

In 2008, King published Duma Key, his first novel set in Florida,^[87] and the collection Just After Sunset.^[88] In 2009, it was announced he would serve as a writer for Fangoria.^[89] King's novel Under the Dome was published later that year, and debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times Bestseller List.^[90] Janet Maslin said of it, "Hard as this thing is to hoist, it's even harder to put down."^[91]

2010s: Full Dark, No Stars to The Institute

In 2010, King published Full Dark, No Stars, a collection of four novellas with the common theme of retribution. In 2011, King published 11/22/63, about a time portal leading to 1958, and an English teacher who travels through it to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. Errol Morris called it "one of the best time travel stories since H. G. Wells".^[92] In 2013, King published Joyland, his second book for the Hard Case Crime imprint.^[93] Later that year, he published Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining.

During his Chancellor's Speaker Series talk at University of Massachusetts Lowell on December 7, 2012, King said that he was writing a crime novel about a retired policeman being taunted by a murderer, with the working title Mr. Mercedes.^[94] In an interview with Parade, King confirmed that the novel was "more or less" completed; he published it in 2014.^[95] The novel won the Edgar Award in 2015.^[96] He returned to horror with Revival, which he called "a nasty, dark piece of work".^[97] King announced in June 2014 that Mr. Mercedes is part of a trilogy; the second book, Finders Keepers, was published in 2015.^[98] The third book of the trilogy, End of Watch, was released in 2016.^[99] In 2018, he released The Outsider, which features the character Holly Gibney, and the novella Elevation.^[100] In 2019, he released The Institute.

2020s: If It Bleeds to present

In 2020, King released If It Bleeds, a collection of four novellas. In 2021, he published Later, his third book for Hard Case Crime.^[101] In 2022, King released the novel Fairy Tale. Holly, about Holly Gibney was released in September 2023.^[102] On November 6, 2023, the short story collection You Like It Darker was announced for a May 21, 2024 release containing twelve stories (seven previously published and five unreleased).

Literature

King co-wrote two novels with Peter Straub, The Talisman (1984) and Black House (2001).^[103] Straub recalls that "We tried to make it as difficult as possible for readers to identify who wrote what. Eventually, we were able to successfully imitate each other’s style... Steve threw in more commas or clauses, and I kind of made things more simple in sentence structure. And I tried to make things as vivid as I could because Steve is just fabulous at that, and also I tried to write more colloquially." Straub said the only person who could correctly identify who wrote which passages was a fellow author, Neil Gaiman.^[104]

King and the photographer by f-stop Fitzgerald collaborated on the coffee table book Nightmares in the Sky: Gargoyles and Grotesques (1988).^[105] He produced an artist's book with designer Barbara Kruger, My Pretty Pony (1989), published in a limited edition of 250 by the Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Alfred A. Knopf released it in a general trade edition.^[106]

King co-wrote Throttle (2009) with his son Joe Hill. The novella is an homage to Richard Matheson's "Duel".^[107] Their second collaboration, In the Tall Grass (2012), was published in two parts in Esquire.^[108][109] King and his son Owen co-wrote Sleeping Beauties (2018), set in a West Virginia women's prison.^[110] King and Richard Chizmar co-wrote Gwendy's Button Box (2017).^[111] A sequel, Gwendy's Magic Feather (2019), was a solo effort by Chizmar.^[112] In 2022, King and Chizmar rejoined forces for Gwendy's Final Task.^[113]

Film and television

King made his screenwriting debut with George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982), a tribute to EC horror comics. In 1985, he wrote another horror anthology film, Cat's Eye. Rob Reiner, whose film Stand By Me (1986) is an adaptation of King's novella The Body, named his production company Castle Rock Entertainment after King's fictional town.^[114] Castle Rock Entertainment would produce other King adaptations, including Reiner's Misery (1990) and Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption (1994).

In 1986, King made his directorial debut with Maximum Overdrive, an adaptation of his story "Trucks". He recalls: "I was coked out of my mind all through its production, and really didn't know what I was doing."^[115] It was not a critical or commercial success success; King was nominated for a Golden Raspberry for Worst Director, but lost to Prince, for Under the Cherry Moon.^[116]

In 1999, King wrote the miniseries Storm of the Century. He wrote the miniseries Rose Red (2002); The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red (2001) was written by Ridley Pearson and published anonymously as a tie-in for the series. He also developed Kingdom Hospital (2004), based on Lars von Trier's The Kingdom.

Music and theater

Lawrence D. Cohen, who wrote the screenplay for Brian De Palma's Carrie, was determined to adapt King's novel into a musical. In 1985, King said "Sometimes I think Larry's turning Carrie into his life's work. I don't know what it's going to be like. We just keep renewing the option, because, after all, there aren't that many people who want to make a musical out of Carrie.^[117] The musical Carrie premiered in 1988.^[118] King collaborated with Stan Winston and Mick Garris on Michael Jackson's music video Ghosts (1996).^[119] King co-wrote the musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County (2012) with T. Bone Burnett and John Mellencamp.^[120]

Comics

In 1985, King wrote a few pages of the benefit X-Men comic book Heroes for Hope Starring the X-Men.^[121] He wrote the introduction to Batman No. 400, an anniversary issue where he expressed his preference for the character over Superman.^[122] In 2010, DC Comics premiered American Vampire, a comic book series co-written by King and Scott Snyder and illustrated by Rafael Albuquerque.^[123] King wrote the backstory of the first American vampire, Skinner Sweet, in the first five-issues story arc.^[124]

Style

Stephen King in 2011

In his memoir On Writing, King recalls:

"When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer (Mark Singer) that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn't believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. And I do. Stories aren't souvenir tee-shirts or GameBoys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small, a seashell. Sometimes it's enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same."^[125]

King often starts with a "what-if" scenario, asking what would happen if an alcoholic writer was stranded with his family in a haunted hotel (The Shining), or if one could see the outcome of future events (The Dead Zone), or if one could travel in time to alter the course of history (11/22/63).^[126] He writes that "The situation comes first. The characters—always flat and unfeatured, to begin with—come next. Once these things are fixed in my mind, I begin to narrate. I often have an idea of what the outcome may be, but I have never demanded a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things their way. In some instances, the outcome is what I visualized. In most, however, it's something I never expected."^[127]

Joyce Carol Oates called King "both a storyteller and an inventor of startling images and metaphors, which linger long in the memory."^[10] An example of King's imagery is seen in The Body when the narrator recalls a childhood clubhouse with a tin roof and rusty screen door: "No matter what time of day you looked out that screen door, it looked like sunset... When it rained, being inside the club was like being inside a Jamaican steel drum."^[128] King writes that "The use of simile and other figurative language is one of the chief delights of fiction—reading it and writing it, as well. When it's on target, a simile delights us in much the same way meeting an old friend in a crowd of strangers does. By comparing two seemingly unrelated objects—a restaurant bar and a cave, a mirror and a mirage—we are sometimes able to see an old thing in a new and vivid way. Even if the result is mere clarity instead of beauty, I think writer and reader are participating together in a kind of miracle. Maybe that's drawing it a little strong, but yeah—it's what I believe."^[129]

Themes

When asked if fear was his main subject, King said "In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that's inexplicable to you, whether it's the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we're still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts."^[20]

King often uses authors as characters, such as Ben Mears in 'Salem's Lot, Jack Torrance in The Shining, adult Bill Denbrough in It, and Mike Noonan in Bag of Bones. He has extended this to breaking the fourth wall by including himself as a character in three novels of The Dark Tower. Among other things, this allows King to explore themes of authorship; George Stade writes that Misery "is a parable in chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his audience, which holds him prisoner and dictates what he writes, on pain of death" while The Dark Half "is a parable in chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his creative genius, the vampire within him, the part of him that only awakes to raise Cain when he writes."^[130]

Joyce Carol Oates said that "Stephen King’s characteristic subject is small-town American life, often set in fictitious Derry, Maine; tales of family life, marital life, the lives of children banded together by age, circumstance, and urgency, where parents prove oblivious or helpless. The human heart in conflict with itself—in the guise of the malevolent Other. The 'gothic' imagination magnifies the vicissitudes of 'real life' in order to bring it into a sharper and clearer focus."^[10] King's The Body is about coming of age, a theme he'd return to several times, for example in Joyland.^[131]

Introducing King at the National Book Awards, Walter Mosley said "Stephen King once said that daily life is the frame that makes the picture. His commitment, as I see it, is to celebrate and empower the everyday man and woman as they buy aspirin and cope with cancer. He takes our daily lives and makes them into something heroic. He takes our world, validates our distrust of it and then helps us to see that there’s a chance to transcend the muck. He tells us that even if we fail in our struggles, we are still worthy enough to pass on our energies in the survival of humanity." In his speech accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, King said: "Frank Norris, the author of McTeague, said something like this: 'What should I care if they, i.e., the critics, single me out for sneers and laughter? I never truckled, I never lied. I told the truth.' And that’s always been the bottom line for me. The story and the people in it may be make believe but I need to ask myself over and over if I’ve told the truth about the way real people would behave in a similar situation."^[7]

Influences

In On Writing, King says "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all: read a lot and write a lot."^[132] He emphasizes the importance of good description, which "begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary. I began learning my lessons in this regard by reading Chandler, Hammett, and Ross Macdonald; I gained perhaps even more respect for the power of compact, descriptive language from reading T. S. Eliot (those ragged claws scuttling across the ocean floor; those coffee spoons), and William Carlos Williams (white chickens, red wheelbarrow, the plums that were in the ice box, so sweet and so cold)."^[133]

King has called Richard Matheson "the author who influenced me most".^[134] Other influences include Ray Bradbury,^[135] James M. Cain,^[136] Jack Finney,^[137] Joseph Payne Brennan,^[138] Elmore Leonard,^[139] John D. MacDonald,^[140] Don Robertson^[141] and Thomas Williams.^[142] King often pays homage to classic horror stories by retelling them in a modern context. He recalls that while writing 'Salem's Lot, "I decided I wanted to try to use the book partially as a form of literary homage (as Peter Straub had done in Ghost Story, working in the tradition of such 'classical' ghost story writers as Henry James, M. R. James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.) So my novel bears an intentional similarity to Bram Stoker's Dracula, and after a while it began to seem I was playing an interesting—to me, at least—game of literary racquet-ball: 'Salem's Lot itself was the ball and Dracula was the wall I kept hitting it against, watching to see how and where it could bounce, so I could hit it again. As a matter of fact, it took some pretty interesting bounces, and I ascribe this mostly to the fact that, while my ball existed in the twentieth century, the wall was very much a product of the nineteenth."^[143] Similarly, King's Revival is a modern riff on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.^[144] King dedicated it to "the people who built my house": Shelley, Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, Fritz Leiber, August Derleth, Shirley Jackson, Robert Bloch, Straub and Arthur Machen, "whose short novel The Great God Pan has haunted me all my life".^[145]

In J. Peder Zane's The Top Ten: Authors Pick Their Favorite Books, King chose The Golden Argosy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Satanic Verses, McTeague, Lord of the Flies, Bleak House, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Raj Quartet, Light in August and Blood Meridian. He provided an appreciation for The Golden Argosy, a collection of short stories featuring Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and others. He recalls that "I first found The Golden Argosy in a Lisbon Falls (Maine) bargain barn called the Jolly White Elephant, where it was on offer for $2.25. At that time I only had four dollars, and spending over half of it on one book, even a hardcover, was a tough decision. I've never regretted it." He calls it "an amazing resource for readers and writers, a treasury in every sense of the word... The Golden Argosy taught me more about good writing than all the writing classes I've ever taken. It was the best $2.25 I ever spent."^[146] In 2022, he provided another list of ten favorite books; Lord of the Flies, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Blood Meridian remained, and he added Ship of Fools, The Orphan Master's Son, Invisible Man, Watership Down, The Hair of Harold Roux, American Pastoral and The Lord of the Rings. He added, "Although Anthony Powell's novels should probably be on here, especially the sublimely titled Casanova's Chinese Restaurant and Books Do Furnish a Room. And Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. And at least six novels by Patricia Highsmith. And what about Patrick O'Brian? See how hard this is to do?"^[147]

Critical reception

King has been praised for his use of realistic detail. In A Century of Great Suspense Stories, editor Jeffery Deaver wrote that "While there were many good best-selling writers before him, King, more than anybody since John D. MacDonald, brought reality to genre novels. He has often remarked that 'Salem's Lot was 'Peyton Place meets Dracula.' And so it was. The rich characterization, the careful and caring social eye, the interplay of story line and character development announced that writers could take worn themes such as vampirism and make them fresh again. Before King, many popular writers found their efforts to make their books serious blue-penciled by their editors. 'Stuff like that gets in the way of the story,' they were told. Well, it's stuff like that that has made King so popular, and helped free the popular name from the shackles of simple genre writing. He is a master of masters."^[37] Daniel Mendelsohn, reviewing Bag of Bones, wrote that "Stephen King is so widely accepted as America's master of paranormal terrors that you can forget his real genius is for the everyday... This is a book about reanimation: the ghosts', of course, but also Mike's, his desire to re-embrace love and work after a long bereavement that King depicts with an eye for the kind of small but moving details that don't typically distinguish blockbuster horror novels."^[148]

Many critics argue that King has matured as a writer. In his analysis of post–World War II horror fiction, The Modern Weird Tale (2001), S. T. Joshi devotes a chapter to King's work. Joshi argues that King's best-known works are his worst, describing them as mostly bloated, illogical, maudlin and prone to deus ex machina endings. Despite these criticisms, Joshi argues that since Gerald's Game (1992), King has been tempering the worst of his writing faults, producing books that are leaner, more believable and generally better written.^[149]

In 2003, King was honored by the National Book Awards with a lifetime achievement award, the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Some in the literary community expressed disapproval of the award: Richard E. Snyder, the former CEO of Simon & Schuster, described King's work as "non-literature" and critic Harold Bloom denounced the choice: "The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for "distinguished contribution" to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis."^[150]

King acknowledged the controversy in his acceptance speech: "There are some people who have spoken out passionately about giving me this medal. There are some people who think it’s an extraordinarily bad idea. There have been some people who have spoken out who think it’s an extraordinarily good idea. You know who you are and where you stand and most of you who are here tonight are on my side. I’m glad for that. But I want to say it doesn’t matter in a sense which side you were on. The people who speak out, speak out because they are passionate about the book, about the word, about the page and, in that sense, we’re all brothers and sisters. Give yourself a hand." King argued that the boundaries between popular and literary fiction aren't as clear as we imagine, and called attention to genre authors he believed deserve critical respect: "I accept this award on behalf of such disparate writers as Elmore Leonard, Peter Straub, Nora Lofts, Jack Ketchum, whose real name is Dallas Mayr, Jodi Picoult, Greg Iles, John Grisham, Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly, Pete Hamill and a dozen more. I hope that the National Book Award judges, past, present and future, will read these writers and that the books will open their eyes to a whole new realm of American literature. You don’t have to vote for them, just read them... My message is simple enough. We can build bridges between the popular and the literary if we keep our minds and hearts open. With my wife’s help, I have tried to do that. Now I’m going to turn the actual medal over to her because she will make sure in all the excitement that it doesn’t get lost."^[7] Shirley Hazzard, whose novel The Great Fire was that year's National Book Award winner, responded: "I don't think giving us a reading list of those who are most read at this moment is much of a satisfaction." Hazzard later said she had never read King.^[151]

Roger Ebert wrote that "A lot people were outraged when he was honored at the National Book Awards, as if a popular writer couldn't be taken seriously. But after finding that his book On Writing has more useful and observant things to say about the craft than any book since Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, I have gotten over my own snobbery. King has, after all, been responsible for the movies The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Dead Zone, Misery, Apt Pupil, Christine, Hearts in Atlantis, Stand By Me and Carrie... And we must not be ungrateful for Silver Bullet, which I awarded three stars because it was 'either the worst movie made from a Stephen King story, or the funniest', and you know which side of that I'm gonna come down on."^[152]

Appraisal by other authors

Cynthia Ozick said that, upon giving a reading with King, "It dawned on me as I listened to him that, never mind all the best sellers and all the stereotypes -- this man is a genuine, true-born writer, and that was a revelation. He is not Tom Clancy. He writes sentences, and he has a literary focus, and his writing is filled with literary history. It's not glib, it's not just contemporary chatter and it's not stupid -- that's a bad way to say that something's smart, but that's what I mean."^[79]

Joyce Carol Oates praised King's sense of place: "His fiction is famously saturated with the atmosphere of Maine; much of his mostly vividly imagined work—Salem’s Lot, Dolores Claiborne, the elegantly composed story 'The Reach', for instance—is a poetic evocation of that landscape, its history and its inhabitants."^[10] Oates included the latter story in the second edition of The Oxford Book of American Short Stories.^[153]

Peter Straub compared King favorably to Charles Dickens: "Both are novelists of vast popularity and enormous bibliographies, both are beloved writers with a pronounced taste for the morbid and grotesque, both display a deep interest in the underclass.”^[154] Straub included King's short story "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French" in the Library of America anthology American Fantastic Tales.^[155]

David Foster Wallace assigned Carrie and The Stand while teaching at Illinois State University. Wallace praised King's ear for dialogue: "He's one of the first people to talk about real Americans and how they live, to capture real American dialogue in all its, like, foulmouthed grandeur... He has a deadly ear for the way people speak... Students come to me and a lot of them have been led to believe that there's good stuff and bad stuff, literary books and popular books, stuff that's redemptive and commercial shit—with a sharp line drawn between the two categories. It's good to show them that there's a certain amount of blurring. Surface-wise, King's work is a bit televisual, but there's really a lot going on."^[26]

Influence

In an interview, Sherman Alexie recalls the influence of "Stephen King, who was always writing about underdogs, and bullied kids, and kids fighting back against overwhelming, often supernatural forces... The world aligned against them. As an Indian boy growing up on a reservation, I always identified with his protagonists. Stephen King, fighting the monsters."^[156]

Lauren Groff says that "I love Stephen King and I owe him more than I could ever express... I love his wild imagination and his vivid scenes, many of which populate my nightmares even decades after I last read the books they're in. But the greatest thing I gleaned most from reading Stephen King is his big-hearted glee, the way he treats writing with gratitude, the way he sees his job not as the source of anguish and pain many writers self-pityingly see it as, but rather as something he's over-the-moon delighted to be lucky enough to do. If I could steal one thing from King, and keep it close to my heart forever, it is his sense of almost-holy glee when it comes to writing."^[157]

The hero of Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao dreams of being "the Dominican Stephen King", and Diaz alludes to King's work several times throughout the novel.^[158] Colson Whitehead recalls that "The first big book I read was Night Shift by Stephen King, you know, a huge book of short stories. And so for many years I just wanted to write horror fiction."^[159] In a talk at Virginia Commonwealth University, Whitehead recalls that in college "I wanted to write the black Shining or the black Salem's Lot... Take any Stephen King title and put 'the black' in front of it. That's basically what I wanted to do."^[160]

Maine politics

King endorsed Shenna Bellows in the 2014 U.S. Senate election for the seat held by Republican Susan Collins.^[183]

King publicly criticized Paul LePage during LePage's tenure as Governor of Maine, referring to him as one of The Three Stooges (with then-Florida Governor Rick Scott and then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker being the other two).^[166] He was critical of LePage for incorrectly suggesting in a 2015 radio address that King avoided paying Maine income taxes by living out of state for part of the year. The statement was later corrected by the governor's office, but no apology was issued. King said LePage was "full of the stuff that makes the grass grow green"^[184] and demanded that LePage "man up and apologize".^[185] LePage declined to apologize to King, stating, "I never said Stephen King did not pay income taxes. What I said was, Stephen King's not in Maine right now. That's what I said."^[186]

The attention garnered by the LePage criticism led to efforts to encourage King to run for Governor of Maine in 2018.^[187] King said he would not run or serve.^[188] King sent a tweet on June 30, 2015, calling LePage "a terrible embarrassment to the state I live in and love. If he won't govern, he should resign." He later clarified that he was not calling on LePage to resign, but to "go to work or go back home".^[189] On August 27, 2016, King called LePage "a bigot, a homophobe, and a racist".^[190]

Car accident and aftermath

On June 19, 1999, at about 4:30 p.m., King was walking on the shoulder of Maine State Route 5, in Lovell, Maine. Driver Bryan Edwin Smith, distracted by an unrestrained dog moving in the back of his minivan, struck King, who landed in a depression in the ground about 14 feet (four meters) from the pavement of Route 5.^[210]: 206 Early reports at the time from Oxford County Sheriff deputy Matt Baker claimed King was hit from behind, and some witnesses said the driver was not speeding, reckless, or drinking.^[211] However, Smith was later arrested and charged with driving to endanger and aggravated assault. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of driving to endanger and was sentenced to six months in county jail (suspended) and had his driving license suspended for a year.^[212] In his book On Writing, King states he was heading north, walking against the traffic. Shortly before the accident took place, a woman in a car, also northbound, passed King first followed by a light blue Dodge van. The van was looping from one side of the road to the other, and the woman told her passenger she hoped "that guy in the van doesn't hit him".^[210]: 206

King was conscious enough to give the deputy phone numbers to contact his family but was in considerable pain. He was transported to Northern Cumberland Hospital in Bridgton and then flown by air ambulance to Central Maine Medical Center (CMMC) in Lewiston. His injuries—a collapsed right lung, multiple fractures of his right leg, scalp laceration and a broken hip—kept him at CMMC until July 9. His leg bones were so shattered that doctors initially considered amputating his leg but stabilized the bones in the leg with an external fixator.^[213] After five operations in 10 days and physical therapy, King resumed work on On Writing in July, though his hip was still shattered and he could sit for only about 40 minutes before the pain became unbearable.^[210]: 216

King's lawyer and two others purchased Smith's van for $1,500, reportedly to prevent it from appearing on eBay. The van was later crushed at a junkyard, to King's disappointment, as he had fantasized about smashing it.^[214][79]

Appearances in other media

In The Princess Bride, William Goldman writes that Stephen King is "doing the abridgment" of the fictional book Buttercup's Baby.^[215] King explains this is an inside joke from Goldman, "who's an old friend. He's done the screen adaptations for a number of my novels. He did Misery, Dreamcatcher and he also did Hearts in Atlantis, and although he's not credited, he worked on Dolores Claiborne as well, so Bill and I go back a long way. I admired his books before I ever met him and as a kind of return tip of the cap, he put me in that book The Princess Bride."^[162]

In 1988, the band Blue Öyster Cult recorded an updated version of its 1974 song "Astronomy"; the single released for radio play featured a narrative intro spoken by King.^[216] In 2012, King provided the narration for Shooter Jennings's album Black Ribbons.^[217]

King was a contestant on Celebrity Jeopardy! in 1995 and 1998.^[218] He's made cameos in adaptations of his work, and appeared as the character Bachman on Sons of Anarchy; the name is a nod to his pseudonym Richard Bachman. He voiced himself in The Simpsons episode "Insane Clown Poppy", where he tells Marge he's taking a break from horror to write a biography of Benjamin Franklin.^[219]

Audiobooks

• 2000: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (read by Stephen King), Simon & Schuster Audio. ISBN 978-0-7435-0665-6.
• 2004: Salem's Lot (introduction), Simon & Schuster Audio. ISBN 978-0-7435-3696-7.
• 2005 (Audible: 2000): Bag of Bones (read by Stephen King). Simon & Schuster Audio. ISBN 978-0743551755.
• 2008: Needful Things (read by Stephen King), Highbridge Audio. ISBN 978-1598877540.
• 2012: The Wind Through The Keyhole – A Dark Tower Novel (read by Stephen King), Simon & Schuster Audio. ISBN 978-1-4423-4697-0.
• 2016: Desperation (read by Stephen King), Simon & Schuster Audio. ISBN 978-1508218661.
• 2018: Elevation (read by Stephen King), Simon & Schuster Audio. ISBN 978-1508260479.