Steven King
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Stephen Edwin King is one of todays most popular and best selling writers. King combines the elements of psychological thrillers, science fiction, and the paranormal and detective themes into his stories. In addition to these themes, King sticks to using great and vivid detail that is set in a realistic everyday place.
Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947, at the Maine General Hospital. Stephen, his mother Nellie, and his adopted brother David were left to fend for themselves when Stephens father Donald, a Merchant Marine captain, left one day, to go the store to buy a pack of cigarettes, and never returned. His fathers leaving had a big impact on Kings Life. In the autobiographical work Danse Macabre, Stephen King recalls how his family life was altered: “After my father took off, my mother, struggled, and then landed on her feet.” My brother and I didnt see a great deal of her over the next nine years. She worked a succession of continuous low paying jobs.
Stephens first outlooks on life were influenced by his older brother, and what he figured out on his own. When he was seven years old, they moved to Stratford, Connecticut. Here is where King got his first exposure to horror. One evening he listened to the radio adaptation of Ray Bradburys story “Mars Is Heaven!” That night King recalls he “slept in the doorway, where the real and rational light of the bathroom bulb could shine on my face” (Beaham 16). Stephen Kings exposure to oral storytelling on the radio had a large impact on his later writings. King tells his stories in visual terms so that the reader would be able to “see” what was happening in their own mind, somewhat in the same fashion the way it was done on the radio (Beaham 17). Kings fascination with horror early on continued and was pushed along only a couple weeks after Bradburys story.
One day little Stephen was looking through his mothers books and came across one named “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” After his mother finished reading the book to him, Stephen was hooked. He immediately asked her to read it again. King recalls “that summer when I was seven, [my mother] must have read it to me half a dozen times” (Beaham 17). Ironically that same year, while Stephen was still seven years old, he went to go see his first horror movie, The Creature from the Black Lagoon. This is important because Stephen says, “Since [the movie], I still see things cinematically. I write down everything I see. What I see, it seems like a movie to me” (Beaham 17). During this year the biggest event that probably had the biggest impact on Stephen Kings writing style was the discovery of the author H. P. Lovecraft. King would later write of Lovecraft, “He struck with the most force, and I still think, for all his
shortcomings, he is the best writer of horror fiction that America has yet produced”(Beaham 22).
In many of Lovecrafts writings he always used his present surroundings as the back drop of his stories. King has followed in his footsteps with the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine. Castle Rock is a combination of several towns that King moved to and from with his family in his childhood. The main town that it resembles is that of Durham, Maine. It was after the exposure to H. P. Lovecrafts stories that King first began to write.
While growing up and moving around the way his family did, Stephen had never been able to feel comfortable and settle down in one place and make friends they way other kids his age did (Underwood 77). Around the age of twelve the King family finally settled in the town of Durham, Maine. For Stephen King, Durham was the place where his imagination began to shine. It was at this time that Stephen first began to make friends.
Along with his friends, Stephen would go the movies a lot. Stephen would use the movies as a inspiration. Although he enjoyed going out and having fun, whenever he would come home, Stephen would immediately write down his experiences and observations. Frequently King would place his friends and family into childhood fantasy tales. And one would always know how Stephen felt about them because of how long they lived in the story.
It was not until college that Stephen King received any kind of real recognition for his writings. In the fall of 1967, King finished his first novel, The Long Walk, and turned it into his sophomore American Literature professor for review. After a couple of weeks and a couple rounds around the department, the English professors were stunned. They realized that they had a real writer on their hands. From then until he graduated with a bachelors degree in English from University of Maine at Orono in the spring of 1970, King concentrated on rounding off the edges of his writing technique.
One short story that best shows the type and technique of Stephen Kings writing is “The Body.” “The Body”, which has been adapted into to a Hollywood movie, was first published in the collection of short stories called Different Seasons. The story is a tale of four twelve year old friends who at the end of one summer go out on a journey into the woods to see a dead body. While on their journey they learn about life, friendship, and are propelled from innocent to experience. On the surface of the story it appears to be simple journey with its occasional mishaps, but the true magnificence is that this story shows strong autobiographical. The main character, Gordie Lachance, is a boy growing up on his own through the memory of his dead older brother. Growing up, Gordie, an avid story teller, dreamed of becoming a writer. Before his brothers accidental death, all his parents would ever care about was his brother. Since his death, Gordies parents have presumably shut themselves away from Gordie. This, to a certain degree is true of King. Because of his father leaving when Stephen was two, and his mother taking on around the clock jobs, he never really had any parental guidance. The story itself is written with Gordie narrating in the present time looking back at the journey. At the time of his flashback, Gordie is a best selling author who has returned to his hometown of Castle Rock to revisit his past. This is ironic because at the time Stephen wrote the story he himself had just moved from Bolder, Colorado, back “home” to the town of Bangor.
Kings childhood home town of Durham is used in several different stories under the fictional town