Stephen King

Stephen King was born on 21 September 1947 in Portland, Maine. At the University of Maine in Orono he wrote a weekly column for the student paper from his sophomore year.

In 1967 he sold his first professional story, "The Glass Floor", to Startling Mystery Stories. In the early years of his marriage to Tabitha Spruce, in 1971, he kept selling stories to men's magazines. Many were later gathered in the collection Night Shift.

He graduated in English in 1970 but could not find a teaching job straight away. He pumped gas, then worked at an industrial laundry, while Tabitha worked at a Dunkin' Donuts. In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone he recalled that they had no phone and already had two babies.

In the autumn of 1971 he finally got a post teaching English at Hampden Academy, a public high school in Maine. He wrote in his spare time: he taught, came home and tried to steal a couple of hours to write.

In the spring of 1973 his novel Carrie was accepted for publication. It came out in 1974, when King was 26. Its success let him leave teaching and write full time.

'Salem's Lot followed, then, after the family moved to Boulder, Colorado, The Shining, published in 1977. In 2014 Rolling Stone estimated he had sold some 350 million books since Carrie.

In 2014 he described a working day to Rolling Stone without any mystique: about two hours of fresh copy, then he goes back, revises some of it, prints what he likes and switches off. Every day, weekends included. He added that he used to write more, and faster.

His book rhythm is just as regular: he writes every day for about six months to get a draft, then stops completely for ten or twelve days to let it settle. After the 1999 accident, when a van hit him while he was out walking, sitting at a computer hurt too much, so he wrote his next novel entirely by hand.