The Running Man

Early life and education

Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine, the second son of Donald Edwin King and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. His older brother was David. When Stephen was about two, his father left the family, and his mother raised the two boys alone. Economic hardship forced the family to move repeatedly, living at different times in Maine, Massachusetts, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought the children back to Durham, Maine, where they remained. She had first been responsible for caring for her elderly parents and later worked in the kitchens of a nearby residential institution.

Frequent moves, isolation, and poverty helped make reading and imaginative storytelling central to King’s childhood. Accounts of his youth describe his discovery of a box of horror novels in the attic during his early teens, an experience that deepened his interest in the genre. At school he wrote stories, submitted material to magazines, and produced a small satirical newspaper. He studied English at the University of Maine and worked with the university publication. In 1967 he met Tabitha Spruce in the university library; they married in 1971.

Before success and the rise of a career

After college, King could not immediately secure a steady teaching position. He worked a succession of jobs, including work connected with a laundry, a service station or automobile repair, and custodial employment, while selling occasional stories to men’s magazines. He eventually became a high-school English teacher, continuing to write in his spare time. He and Tabitha lived with very limited means and at one point made a home in a trailer, where writing had to be fitted into an improvised domestic life. Tabitha was an early reader of his work and an important source of encouragement.

His breakthrough came with Carrie, published in 1974. The novel about an isolated high-school girl with telekinetic powers became a bestseller and ended the prolonged financial insecurity of the King household. He followed it with Salem’s Lot in 1975, The Shining in 1977, and The Stand in 1978. These books established his characteristic combination of ordinary communities, family tensions, psychological fear, and supernatural or catastrophic threats. In 1982 he published The Running Man under the name Richard Bachman, a pseudonym that also allowed him to write in a leaner, more openly pessimistic style. Other Bachman novels include Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and Thinner.

Major works and reputation

King’s career has never been limited to conventional horror. It includes It in 1986, Misery in 1987, The Dark Half in 1989, and The Green Mile in 1996. The Dark Tower sequence began with The Gunslinger in 1982 and continued through 2012, bringing together elements of western fiction, fantasy, horror, and epic quest narrative. His later work includes the historical time-travel novel 11/22/63, published in 2011, as well as novels, short-story collections, nonfiction, screenplays, and other projects.

Many of his works have been adapted for film and television. The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile demonstrate that his influence extends well beyond supernatural horror, while adaptations of Carrie, The Shining, It, Misery, and other books have helped make his characters and settings part of global popular culture. King has also worked as a screenwriter, producer, director, and actor. He received the National Medal of Arts in 2003 and the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award in 2007.

Later life and lasting influence

King has written openly about alcoholism and drug dependence during the years after his success. With the support of his family, he recovered, and the experience became an important part of his understanding of discipline, fear, and creative work. He and Tabitha King have three children, including writers Joe Hill and Owen King. Stephen King is still living and active as a writer; consequently, there is no death date or death event to record.

Often called the modern master of horror, King is also one of the most productive and widely read American authors of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His lasting reputation rests not simply on his ability to invent monsters. He repeatedly places recognizable people inside pressures created by class, family, memory, addiction, violence, and institutions, then examines the choices they make. That human focus has allowed his work to remain influential in popular culture while also making it significant to the study of genre fiction and contemporary storytelling.