Stephen King :: biographies bio biography

Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second word of honor of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his parents separated when Stephen was a toddler, he and his grey-headeder brother, David, were raise by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his fathers family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to shorthorn, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical like of the elderly couple. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephens grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.Stephen attended the grammar schooling in Durham and then Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his intermed iate year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly tower for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, dowry as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti- fight vogue on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on cause of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.He and Tabitha debonaire married in January of 1971. He met Tabitha in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono, where they both worked as students. As Stephen was unable to find stance as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occa sional make headway from a short story sale to mens magazines.Stephen made his kickoff professional short story sale (The Glass Floor) to ball over Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he move to sell stories to mens magazines. Many of these were later gathered into the Night campaign collection or appeared in other anthologies.In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teach high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine.