King Essay Research Paper James SealeEd SearsEnglish

King Essay, Research Paper

James Seale

Ed Sears

English 1302-19

7 March, 2000

Stephen Edwin King is one of today’s most popular and best selling writers. King’s major contribution to horror literature is to situate it within the general anxieties of contemporary life. His focus is not on vampires, werewolves and such, but on ordinary people faced with these horrors and the darker horrors of lost jobs, disintegrating families, mental breakdown, and all the other fears that haunt the modern age. What makes Stephen King.s stories almost magical is that the settings of his stories. King has the ability to make terrifying situations out of apparently ordinary circumstances. Additionally, King’s writings are true to life in people.s minds because he draws upon common fears. King’s writings are so widely appealing that over 45 of his works have been based upon or turned into Hollywood movies.

Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947 in Portland, Maine he was a suprise addition to the family, as his mother had been told that she would never have children. His parents, Donald and Nellie King, were experiencing difficulties in their marriage, and when Stephen King was only 2, his father, a door-to-door salesman for Electrolux, left the house to buy a pack of cigarettes but never returned. His father.s walking out had a huge indirect impact on his 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 didn’t see a great deal of her over the next nine years. She worked a succession of continuous low paying jobs” (67). While young, Stephen King and his family moved around the North Eastern and Central United States. When he was seven years old, they moved to Stratford, Connecticut. Here is where Stephen King got his first exposure to horror. One evening he listened to the radio adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s 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 King’s exposure to oral storytelling on the radio had a huge 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. One day little Stephen was looking through his mother’s books and came across one named The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. After his mother finished reading the book to him, he was hooked. He immediately asked her to read it again. Stephen 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. It was during this year that Stephen King discovered the works of Howard Phillips 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”(Beaham17). Inspired by such writers as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch and Jack Finny he began thinking more about horror writing, and published I Was A Teenage Grave Robber.

While growing up and moving around the way his family did, Stephen King was never 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 King, Durham was the place where his imagination began to shine. It was at this time that he first began to make friends. Although he enjoyed going out and having fun, as soon as he walked in the door Stephen King would immediately write down his experiences and observations. Frequently Stephen King would place his friends and family into childhood fantasy tales.

Stephen King did not receive any real recognition for his writing until college. 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 bachelor.s 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. While studying at University, he met his wife-to- be Tabitha Spruce. They met in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono, where they both worked as students. He received his bachelors of Science in English in 1970, then married Tabitha Spruce in 1971. Stephen and his wife have been blessed by the births of their three children Naomi Rachel, Joseph Hill, and Owen Phillip.

While writing, he supported himself by teaching and working as a janitor, among other jobs. .As a high school English teacher, King collected rejection letters for his first two novels before receiving a $2,500 advance for Carrie, which his wife had rescued from the trash can..(Mr. Showbiz) His first published novel, about a tormented teenage girl, Carrie White, gifted with telekinetic pow