160 Unknown Facts About Stephen King

160 Unknown Facts About Stephen King

• His full name is Stephen Edwin King. He is 73 years old and was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine.
• He married his wife, Tabitha, in 1971.
• King tries to write a minimum of 2,000 words a day.
• He prefers to use paper and a Waterman fountain pen.
• They have three children together – Naomi, Joe, and Owen.
• He is a fan of AC/DC and The Ramones.
• In 1982, King published “Different Seasons,” a collection four novellas, three of which became motion picture films.
• The first of these stories was “Stand by Me,” based on King’s short story “The Body,” which premiered in theaters in 1986.
• The second of these stories was “The Shawshank Redemption,” based on King’s short story “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” which premiered in theaters in 1994.
• In advertising from this film, King’s named was mostly omitted to draw in a different crowd.
• The final of these novellas to be adapted onto the big screen was “Apt Pupil,” which premiered in 1998 and was directed by Bryan Singer, who’d go on to direct many of the XMen films.
• Stephen King wrote under the name Bachman to test whether his success was because of his popularity or because of his writing. Those books sold just as well, proving to him that he was worthy of his success.
• Stephen King tries to write a minimum number of words each day, estimated to be 2000. He prefers writing with a fountain pen and paper.
• Beginning in 2003 Stephen King began writing for Entertainment Weekly as a pop culture journalist.
• Of his novels adapted to screen, Stephen King's favorites are Stand By Me, The Mist and The Shawshank Redemption.
• That year, his daughter Naomi Rachel was born. He wrote a column, Steve King’s Garbage Truck, for the student newspaper, The Maine Campus and participated in a writing workshop organized by Burton Hatlen.
• King held a variety of jobs to pay for his studies, including janitor, gas pump attendant, and worker at an industrial laundry.
• His books have sold more than 350 million copies, many of which have been adapted into feature films, miniseries, television shows, and comic books.
• King has published 54 novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, and six nonfiction books. He has written nearly 200 short stories, most of which have been collected in book collections.
• His primary occupation is a novelist, but he has also produced shows for television and other such media.
• His books are classed as horror, fantasy, and sciencefiction.
• He has written under two pen names – Richard Bachman and John Swithen.
• King has written over 49 fulllength novels, 7 pennamed books, 5 nonfiction texts, and 5 short story collections.
• His father abandoned the family, leaving his wife, adopted son David and young Stephen behind.
• King’s mother, Nellie Ruth, was born in Scarborough, Maine.
• Donald and Nellie were married July 23, 1939, in Cumberland County, Maine.
• When Stephen King was two years old, his father left the family under the pretense of “going to buy a pack of cigarettes”, leaving his mother to raise Stephen and his older brother, David, by herself, sometimes under great financial strain.
• The family moved to De Pere, Wisconsin, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Stratford, Connecticut. When King was 11, the family returned to Durham, Maine, where his mother cared for her parents until their deaths.
• As King related in his memoir, he then sought help, quit all drugs (including alcohol) in the late 1980s, and has remained sober since.
• The first novel he wrote after becoming sober was Needful Things.
• Nine novels by Tabitha King have been published. Both of Stephen and Tabitha King’s sons are published authors: Owen King published his first collection of stories, We’re All in This Together: A Novella and Stories, in 2005.
• Joseph Hillstrom King, who writes under the professional name Joe Hill, published a collection of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts, in 2005.
• His debut novel, HeartShaped Box, was published in 2007 and will be adapted into a feature film by director Neil Jordan.
• In 1999 King was hit by a minivan. He suffered several injuries including, a collapsed right lung, multiple fractures in his right leg, scalp lacerations, and a broken hip. During his recovery period, he thought about retiring, but ideas came for Lisey’s Story.
• He has collaborated with many authors and artists including Peter Straub and Michael Jackson.
• King writes as a pop culture journalist for Entertainment Weekly. This career began in 2003.
• His favorite noveltoscreen adaptations are Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Mist.
• His father, Donald Edwin King, was born circa 1913 in Peru, Indiana, and was a merchant seaman.
• When Donald was born, his surname was Pollock, but as an adult, he used the surname King.
• She then became a caregiver in a local residential facility for the mentally challenged. King was raised Methodist and remains religious as an adult.
• As a child, King apparently witnessed one of his friends being struck and killed by a train, though he has no memory of the event.
• Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro was offered a cameo in the film as a janitor who flees from Pennywise, however, this wasn’t included in the final film.
• King has used a number of pseudonyms throughout his career, including John Swithen, Beryl Evans and Richard Bachman.
• King published a children’s book “Charlie the ChooChoo: From the World of the Dark Tower” in 2016.
• In 2006, after publishing his novel “Cell,” King admitted that he doesn’t use cell phones.
• King’s longest book is “The Stand,” which has 1,153 pages.
• Thus far, King has published 61 novels and over 200 short stories. His upcoming novel, “Later,” is scheduled to hit stands on March 2nd, 2021.
• Before he was a successful novelist, he sold short stories to men’s magazines such as Cavalier.
• He holds a Bachelor of Arts in English degree from the University of Maine.
• The first draft of the novel Carrie went into the trashcan, but Tabitha saw potential. The novel went on to earn paperback rights of over $400,000.
• Other popular works of the time were Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and The Stand.
• It was during this time when King suffered from alcohol and drug abuse. He has remained sober since the late ’80s.
• In the 2005 film Fever Pitch, about an obsessive Boston Red Sox fan, King tosses out the first pitch of the Sox’s openingday game.
• As a child, Stephen King witnessed a friend of his get struck and killed by a train.
• He initially had no memory of the event and found out later from his family what happened.
• King was inspired to become a horror author after reading a collection of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft.
• His short story “The Man in the Black Suit” (1994) received the O. Henry Award. He has also received awards for his contribution to literature for his entire oeuvre, such as the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (2004), the Canadian Booksellers Association Lifetime Achievement Award (2007), and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America (2007).
• In 2015, King was awarded with a National Medal of Arts from the United States National Endowment for the Arts for his contributions to literature.
• King and his wife Tabitha own and occupy three different houses: one in Bangor, Maine, one in Lovell, Maine, and for the winter a waterfront mansion located off the Gulf of Mexico in Sarasota, Florida. He and Tabitha have three children, Naomi, Joseph Hillstrom King (pen name Joe Hill) and Owen King, and four grandchildren.
• King’s addictions to alcohol and other drugs were so serious during the 1980s that, as he acknowledged in On Writing in 2000, he can barely remember writing Cujo.
• After the death of his mother, King briefly to Boulder, Colorado where he wrote his third novel, “The Shining.”
• King became inspired to write “The Shining” after spending the night in The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado.
• Other stories that inspired King to write this story include “The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death” and “Burnt Offerings.”
• Initially, King had written a prologue for “The Shining” called “Before the Play,” which told the earlier events of the Overlook Hotel, as well as an epilogue called “After the Play.”
• From 1982 through 2012, King published eight books and two short stories in “The Dark Tower” series.
• These stories were primarily inspired by a poem called “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” which was written by Robert Browning in 1852.
• King was also heavily influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien and his “The Lord of the Rings” books when writing this series.
• In 2007, a comic book series inspired by “The Dark Tower” series was published.
• A film adaption based on the series debuted in 2017, which starred Idris Elba as the gun slinging protagonist.
• Stephen King taught creative writing at the University of Maine in 1977.
• Stephen King has written under the pen names Richard Bachman and John Swithen.
• Stephen King suffered from alcoholism and drug abuse in the 70s and 80s and has remained sober since the late 80s.
• Stephen King has written more than 54 novels beginning with Carrie (1974). His latest novel (as of this writing) is Finders Keepers scheduled to be released in 2015.
• Stephen King has published 11 collections of stories including Night Shift (1978), Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993), and The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015).
• He was inspired to write by his father’s old copy of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Lurker in the Shadows.
• When he was a child, he witnessed his friend die in a train accident. He had no memory of the event.
• King wrote for Marvel comics Heroes for Hope Starring the XMen – charity works to help prevent famine in Africa.
• His The Dark Towers series has been described as a successful fantasy that bridges with the spaghetti western.
• Believing his popularity to be an accident, King wrote as Bachman. The books sold equally well, and King was outed.
• He starred in George Romero’s film Knightriders as an enthusiastic audience member.
• King is a Boston Red Sox fan. His own hobby influenced the story The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.
• He is a political activist, speaking out against the restriction of violent video games to under 18’s. Even though he isn’t a gamer himself, he believes the politicians scapegoat media that is less damaging than horror films.
• King has won over 50 awards for his novels – his first was the 1978 American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults with “Salem’s Lot”.
• Stephen King is believed to have witness the death of a friend when he was a child. The friend was struck by a train. Stephen has no recollection of the incident.
• Stephen's decision to write horror came when he found an old book of his fathers titled The Lurker in the Shadows by H.P. Lovecraft, in the attic when he was boy.
• The same year that Stephen King graduated from university his daughter Naomi Rachel was born.
• Stephen King married Tabitha Spruce in 1971.
• Stephen Kings book Carrie was accepted by Doubleday & Company in 1973 for a $2,500 advance. The paperback rights earned him $400,000. This made it possible for Stephen to quit teaching and write full time.
• Salem's Lot was published in 1975. The Shining was published in 1977, and The Stand was published in 1978.
• By 1977 Stephen and Tabitha had all three children including Naomi, Joe and Owen.
• Stephen King has also published 5 nonfiction books, 7 novellas, and 9 other works.
• Many of Stephen King's books have been adapted for film and TV movies.
• Stephen King has won many prestigious awards for his work and continues to write to this day.
• His family told him that after leaving home to play with the boy, King returned, speechless and seemingly in shock.
• He began writing for fun while still in school, contributing articles to Dave’s Rag, the newspaper his brother published with a mimeograph machine, and later began selling to his friends stories based on movies he had seen (though when discovered by his teachers, he was forced to return the profits).
• The first of his stories to be independently published was “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber”; it was serialized over four issues (three published and one unpublished) of a fanzine, Comics Review, in 1965.
• That story was published the following year in a revised form as “In a HalfWorld of Terror” in another fanzine, Stories of Suspense, edited by Marv Wolfman.
• From 1966, King studied at the University of Maine, graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English.
• Many of his stories are set in his home state of Maine. His novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption was the basis for the movie The Shawshank Redemption which is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time.
• King has received Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards, and British Fantasy Society Awards. His novella The Way Station (1980) was a Nebula Award novelette nominee.
• In 2003, the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
• Shortly after the novel’s publication, King’s family and friends staged an intervention, dumping on the rug in front of him evidence of his addictions taken from his office including beer cans, cigarette butts, grams of cocaine, Xanax, Valium, NyQuil, dextromethorphan (cough medicine) and marijuana.
• King’s daughter Naomi is a Unitarian Universalist Church minister in Plantation, Florida, with her samesex partner, Rev. Dr. Thandeka.
• King is a fan of baseball, and of the Boston Red Sox in particular; he frequently attends the team’s home and away games, and occasionally mentions the team in his novels and stories.
• He helped coach his son Owen’s Bangor West team to the Maine Little League Championship in 1989. He recounts this experience in the New Yorker essay “Head Down”, which appears also in the collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes.
• In 1999, King wrote The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, featuring former Red Sox pitcher Tom Gordon as the protagonist’s imaginary companion.
• King was a big fan of horror comics, notably the anthology series “Tales from the Crypt.”
• King’s first published story was called “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber” and was published in “Comic Review” in 1965.
• King attended the University of Maine and intended to become a high school teacher, however, after graduation he was unable to find a job.
• As a young adult, King was arrested for stealing traffic cones and paid off the $250 petty larceny fine with a check for his short story, “The Raft.”
• Before focusing on writing full time, King taught at the Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine.
• Although not the first novel he’d written, “Carrie” was King’s first published novel.
• “Carrie” was written on King’s wife’s portable typewriter and after almost giving up, she helped him to write the story from a female perspective.
• King’s second published novel, “‘Salem’s Lot” debuted in 1975 and a theatrical film adaptation is currently being made.
• “It” was King’s 22nd book and King became inspired to write the story after remembering the story of “Three Billy Goats Gruff.”
• King also became inspired to write this story after researching the history and construction of the sewer system in Bangor, Maine.
• King’s story has been adapted four times: a 1990 miniseries, a 1998 Hindi horror series and two feature films in 2017 and 2019.
• King made a cameo in “It Chapter Two” as the pawn shop owner who sells Bill his childhood bike.
• Only later did the family learn of the friend’s death. Some commentators have suggested that this event may have psychologically inspired some of King’s darker works, but King makes no mention of it in his memoir On Writing (2000).
• King related in detail his primary inspiration for writing horror fiction in his nonfiction Danse Macabre (1981), in a chapter titled “An Annoying Autobiographical Pause”. King compares his uncle’s successfully dowsing for water using the bough of an apple branch with the sudden realization of what he wanted to do for a living.
• That inspiration occurred while browsing through an attic with his elder brother, when King uncovered a paperback version of an H. P. Lovecraft collection of short stories he remembers as The Lurker in the Shadows, that had belonged to his father.
• King told Barnes & Noble Studios during a 2009 interview, “I knew that I’d found home when I read that book.”
• King attended Durham Elementary School and graduated from Lisbon Falls High School, in Lisbon Falls, Maine. He displayed an early interest in horror as an avid reader of EC’s horror comics, including Tales from the Crypt (he later paid tribute to the comics in his screenplay for Creepshow).
• In 2004, King cowrote a book titled Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season with Stewart O’Nan, recounting the authors’ rollercoaster reaction to the Red Sox’s 2004 season, a season culminating in the Sox winning the 2004 American League Championship Series and World Series.

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