Who is Stephen King ?

There he graduated from Lisbon Falls High School in 1966.

King stayed close to home for college, attending the University of Maine at Orono. There he wrote for the school's newspaper and served in its student government.

While in school, King published his first short story, which appeared in Startling Mystery Stories.

After graduating with a degree in English in 1970, he tried to find a position as a teacher but had no luck at first.

King took a job in a laundry and continued to write stories in his spare time until late 1971, when he began working as an English educator at Hampden Academy.

It was that year that he also married fellow writer Tabitha Spruce.

In 1973, King sold his first novel, Carrie, the tale of a tormented teen who gets revenge on her peers.

Home Sweet Home
Stephen King was born in the state of Maine, and still lives in the town of Bangor. King has used Maine as the setting for many of his horror novels.

The book became a huge success after it was published the following year, allowing him to devote himself to writing full time.

It was later adapted for the big screen with Sissy Spacek as the title character.

More popular novels soon followed, including Salem's Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), Firestarter (1980), Cujo (1981) and IT (1986).

Runs in the Family
King’s father, Donald Edwin King, was also an (unsuccessful) writer. “I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts,” King said. His father walked out on the family when King was only two years old, and he never saw his dad again.

While making novels about vicious, rabid dogs and sewer-dwelling monsters—as seen in Cujo and IT, respectively—King published several books as Richard Bachman.

Four early novels—Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981) and The Running Man (1982)—were published under the moniker because of King's concern that the public wouldn't accept more than one book from an author within a year.

He came up with the alias after seeing a novel by Richard Stark on his desk (which it turned out was a pseudonym used by Donald Westlake) coupled with what he heard playing on his record player at the time—"You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet," by Bachman Turner Overdrive.

Although many of King's works were made into film or TV adaptations—Cujo and Firestarter were released for the big screen in 1983 and '84 respectively, while It debuted as a miniseries in 1990—the film The Shining, released in 1980 and starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, became a renowned horror thriller that has stood the test of time.

Missing in Action
In the first grade, King was forced to repeat the year because of frequent absences.

For a good portion of his career, King wrote novels and stories at a breakneck speed. He published several books per year for much of the 1980s and '90s.

Rolling in the Dough
King has an estimated net worth of $400 Million. He has luxury cars, his own private jet, and a waterfront vacation home in Florida.

A Life-Changing Discovery
One day while Stephen’s brother David was exploring the family attic, he found boxes of his father’s belongings. He called Stephen up to the attic, where Stephen discovered a box filled with horror novels.

His compelling, thrilling tales have continued to be used as the basis of numerous films for the big and small screens. Actress Kathy Bates and actor James Caan starred in the critically and commercially successful adaptation of Misery in 1990, with Bates winning an Oscar for her performance as the psychotic Annie Wilkes.

Dream World
King used to have a recurring nightmare where he entered a room to witness a suicide victim hanging from the ceiling. To make matters worse, suicides have occurred in three of King’s houses.

Four years later, The Shawshank Redemption, starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman and based on one of his stories, became another acclaimed outing with multiple Oscar nominations.

Try, Try Again
Stephen King started writing and submitting his short stories when he was 16. Every time he got a rejection letter, he put the letter on a nail on his wall. Eventually he got so many rejection letters that the nail fell down. King finally got his first acceptance when he was 19 for a story called “The Glass Floor.” He was paid $35.

King's 1978 novel The Stand became a 1994 miniseries with Molly Ringwald and Gary Sinise in the lead, while the mid-'90s serialized outing The Green Mile was turned into a 1999 prison-based film starring Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan.