-from this week's writers almanac...
It's the birthday of horror novelist Stephen King, born in Portland, Maine (1947). He's the author of many novels, including The Shining (1977), Pet Sematary (1983), and most recently From a Buick 8 (2002).
His father, a merchant seaman, deserted the family when he was two. He has no memories of the man, but one day he found a boxful of his father's science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, including an anthology of stories from Weird Tales magazine and a book by horror author H. P. Lovecraft. That box of his father's books inspired him to start writing horror stories.
After college, King worked jobs at a gas station and a laundromat. His wife worked at Dunkin' Donuts. He said, "Budget was not exactly the word for whatever it was we were on. It was more like a modified version of the Bataan Death March." His writing office was the furnace room of his trailer home, and all of his rough drafts were typed single-spaced, with no margins, to save paper.
He sold a series of horror stories to men's magazines, and he said that the paychecks from these stories always seemed to arrive when one of his kids had an ear infection or the car had broken down.
His first novel was Carrie (1973), about a weird, miserable, high school girl with psychic powers. The hard cover didn't sell very well, but when his agent called to say that the paperback rights had sold for $400,000, King couldn't believe it. He said, "The only thing I could think to do was go out and buy my wife a hair dryer. I stumbled across the street to get it and thought I would probably get greased by some car."
He went on to become one of the most popular novelists of all time. Before him, most horror novels took place in drafty old mansions and castles. His horror novels take place in ordinary American small towns, at fast food restaurants, local libraries, and little league baseball games. King says that he writes about his own fears, and he claims to be afraid of spiders, elevators, closed-in places, the dark, flying, sewers, funerals, cancer, heart attacks, and being buried alive, among other things.
The first time someone asked him for his autograph was in a deli. The man behind the counter looked at him funny and asked if King was somebody famous. King got excited about being recognized for the first time, but then man said, "I know, you're Francis Ford Coppola." King said yes, he was Francis Ford Coppola, and he gave the man a signed napkin that said, "Francis Ford Coppola."
Last fall, the National Book Foundation gave King its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Previous recipients of the medal have been Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller and Toni Morrison. Some members of the literary community objected to King receiving the medal because they claim he doesn't write literary fiction.
In his acceptance speech, King said, "I salute the National Book Foundation Board, who took a huge risk in giving this award to a man many people see as a rich hack...Giving an award like this to a guy like me suggests that...bridges can be built between the so-called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction. The first gainers in such a widening of interest would be the readers."
When asked what he wanted to achieve when he first became a writer, King said, "I wanted people to leave jobs, to ride past their stop on a bus or train, to burn dinner--because of my books. I wanted to take them prisoner."
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