Steven King essays

Steven King essays Stephen Edward King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. He was the second son of a middle-aged couple, Donald and Nellie King. In 1949, Steven's father, Donald King disappeared and was never seen or heard from again by his family. Stephen and his elder brother David were brought up very strictly by their mother Ruth, who was forced to rely upon the charity of relatives. The family spent several years in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Stratford, Connecticut before settling down in 1958, in Durham, Maine, where Nellie cared for her aging parents. Stephen King was a very sick as a child, and illness once kept him out of school for an entire year. To entertain himself, he began writing at about the age of seven, first copying stories from children's books and later creating his own fantasy tales. By the age twelve, he was cranking out science fiction stories on an old Underwood typewriter his mother had given him; he even sought, unsuccessfully to have them published. In 1959, in a box of his father's old books stored in an attic, he discovered collections from Weird Tales, a fantasy and horror magazine of the 1940's as well as a volume of stories by the famous horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Horror tales soon became an obsession, and he eventually came upon those of Richard Matheson, another prominent writer of the genre. King has frequently acknowledged Matheson's great influence on his own writing. As a high school student, King made copies of his stories on an old printing press his brother had acquired and he then sold them at school. Though these first efforts at professionalism were quickly ended by the school principal, King had become certain that he would succeed. To his friends, he seemed a relatively normal teenager, but he already had a vision in his head to become a writer. He graduated from the University of Maine in 1970 with a degree in English; in the fall of 1971. He began teaching at a hi...