Stephen King: the king of horror as a father

Stephen King is a well-known author of terrifying tales who has sold 350 million copies of his 60 novels. Furthermore, it appears that he is aware of the key to passing down his writing prowess through inheritance.

Twice through his three children, two are writing professionally. And his family comprises five writers altogether!

Stephen King"s Childhood

Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947 in Portland in the family of pianist Nellie Ruth Pillsbury (née) and merchant marine captain Donald Edward King. Pregnancy was a wonderful surprise for Ruth, who had lived with a diagnosis of infertility for many years. Two years before this event, the couple, desperate to have a child, her own child, adopted a baby of the boy David Victor. But a happy family life did not work out. Donald could not sit still, and his family was a burden to him. At first he disappeared into the sea. Then, having left the navy, he chose the profession of a traveling salesman and again almost never appeared at home. And when Stephen was two years old, his father once left the house for cigarettes and never returned.

"How could a mother respond to a child’s inquiry about their father’s whereabouts? Ruth thought of nothing more enjoyable than to make up a tale about the Martians who brought Donald aboard their spacecraft.

This, in the woman’s opinion, was more merciful than the reality. Who knows, perhaps this incident served as the catalyst for Stephen’s vivid imagination?

Perhaps a different tale about a four-year-old boy and his friend going for a stroll along the railroad tracks explained the situation. The spirit of "The King of Horrors" pervaded this walk’s conclusion. After going on a walk, one child came back whole, while the other came back in the form of individual body parts that adults placed in a wicker basket after running into a train. Stephen King was the only boy to survive; he learned of this tale only from his mother because he was unable to process the horrific memories.

It wasn’t until they were filming a CBS documentary about the writer in the 1990s that Stephen and his brother found out what had happened to their father. The crew used Donald’s social security number to obtain information about him. He married Ruth without divorcing her, and he lived very close to the previous house from which he "went out for cigarettes" until his death in 1980. It was a crime that four children and a Brazilian wife were unaware that Donald was a bigamist. Stephen made the decision to keep the information private in order to protect the unexpectedly found relatives.

Stephen and his family moved around a lot following the death of his father. His mother did everything, including cleaning houses, baking buns, and doing laundry. Ruth and the boys eventually made Durham, Maine, their new home. Many of King’s works are set in this state.

In order for Ruth to care for her aging parents, the family moved in with her. Here Stephen had his first creative thought for the story "Happiness Coupons" while observing his mother insert green coupons into a special book. However, he started writing even earlier—during the first grade, when he was confined to bed for nearly the whole year because of recurrent illnesses. The boy was abandoned for the second year as a result, but he read a lot of books again and started making up stories. They were far from depressing; little children were saved by magical creatures in their ancient automobile.

Ruth supported her son in every manner possible and was incredibly proud that he was writing. She proudly mailed Steve’s creations to her family and gave him twenty-five cents for each new story.

Ruth gave her son a typewriter for his eleventh birthday, and he used it for many years. Stephen developed a lifelong interest in science fiction and comic books. He also enjoyed viewing "horror films" in theaters. He himself aspired to create something akin to it, something that would be both terrifying and completely untraceable.

King wrote not only about otherworldly and alien horrors, his works reflected the complexities and injustice of his own life. He never complained or lost heart, he endured need quite easily and came up with all sorts of ways to earn money together with his brother. In the basement of their own house, they published a family newspaper, the circulation of which in its best times reached fifty copies.
After watching one of the most exciting films, Steve had a brilliant idea write a book about it. He didn"t even think that it was plagiarism. "The Book" was a stunning success with his classmates. However, the school administration did not approve of either business within the walls of the educational institution or the subject of the work. From his teacher, the future great writer listened to a tirade about how he was wasting his abilities on nonsense. Only many years later did he understand that:

"No matter what kind of writing you do—books, paintings, sculptures, singing, or anything else—someone will undoubtedly try to make you feel ashamed of it."

"In the Half-World of Horror" was the title of the magazine’s debut story. King at the time was eighteen years old. He had been sending his stories to magazines and publishing houses for six years prior to this incident, without success.

Steve gathered rejection slips. He first hung them from a nail, then he replaced it with a carpenter’s crutch when it could no longer hold the many papers.

The crutch and Stephen remained strong despite the rejections. Even so, the teacher’s criticism that he was squandering his talent and writing rubbish rang in his ears for a long time.

Stephen King"s Creative Path

Stephen did part-time work in a nearby factory while he was a high school student, dying cloth. Her creative ideas came to her in a flash. Later, discussions about enormous rats living in a factory building gave rise to the story "Night Shift," which King was able to sell for two hundred dollars at the time, a huge sum of money. When Steve, then 19 years old, started attending the University of Maine in 1966, he worked part-time in the library there and made Tabitha Spruce, his future wife, there. It was she who convinced her husband to finish writing "Carrie" after discovering a draft of the novel in the trash.

Writing is a solitary profession. Additionally, it already means a lot if someone believes in you."

This book was King’s first big hit, earning him a $200,000 contract in 1974. At the time, the writer was 27 years old. Sadly, Ruth passed away from cancer a few months before she could witness her son’s enormous success. The writer’s family had a very low-key lifestyle up until this point, and Stephen had worked as a school teacher before starting out in a laundry. The novel was made into a movie two years later.

For a while, Stephen King had to write under the pseudonym Richard Bachman due to publishers not wanting to publish so many books by one author.Writing was not easy for the prolific author. However, he wasn’t always overflowing with concepts. Periods of decline when original ideas were impossible to come up with alternated with periods of activity.

The author developed a drug and alcohol addiction. He initially took them to unwind and get rid of anxieties. Subsequently, he started to worry that he wouldn’t be able to write without using drugs. And after that, he was unable to kick the addiction.

He wrote while stoned and under the influence of drugs, and afterwards he was unable to recall exactly what he had written. King later acknowledged, for instance, that he had no memory at all of writing The Tommyknockers and a number of other pieces.

King did not consider his addiction to be a problem for a very long time. It took a lot of work on the part of the family to persuade him that it was serious. The 44-year-old writer didn’t start considering treatment until he saw the astounding collection of bottles, cans, and cigarette butts strewn throughout the house. Needful Things was the first book written following rehabilitation.

King responded, "Why do you think I have a choice?" when asked why he wrote such terrifying stories.

Stephen King"s personal life

"On January 7, 1971, 23-year-old Stephen King and 21-year-old Tabitha Spruce tied the knot following the birth of their daughter Naomi on June 1, 1970.

After relocating to Hampden, Maine, Stephen began working as a school teacher and spending his free time writing novels. Tabitha was a writer in addition to a salesperson. Joseph Hillstrom, the couple’s son, was born on June 4, 1972. When Stephen "won the lottery" and sold the rights to "Carrie" for a huge sum of money, the spouses, who were struggling to make ends meet and had two children, were living in a small apartment. On January 21, 1977, son Owen was born into a prosperous family. His father had quit his teaching career to focus entirely on his writing.

Children frequently suffer horrible things in Stephen King’s books. Some people are confused and ask, "How can you come up with such terrible stories, having your own children?" This is how the author responds to this query:

"I wrote about children, not because I was sadistic or angry, or anything like that. Instead, I reasoned that since I was writing about it, nothing similar would occur in real life, almost as if I was trying to avoid bringing bad luck."

But occasionally, I had to control my rage. King found it difficult to focus in a home with young children. Joe used to color the pages of a manuscript after it was finished. Stephen could hardly contain his emotions as he tried to stop his son from doing so.

Everybody in the King family is an avid reader. Stephen invented a method for producing audio books at home back when cassette tape recorders were still in use. Children read books that were intended for audio recording. They were thus also introduced to reading, and the author had a library of books that he would occasionally listen to while traveling.

For his kids, Stephen also wrote fairy tales. Not every one of them was frightening. For instance, King penned "The Eyes of the Dragon" for his daughter Naomi, who at the time had a fascination with dragons.

This is, incidentally, one of the writer’s few unfilmed works.

King, among other things, occasionally had bit parts in motion pictures. For instance, the author portrayed farmer Jordy Verrill in the 1982 Horror Anthology, whose plot was struck by a meteorite. A boy can be seen reading Creepshow horror comics in the movie’s last scenes. Joe King, Stephen’s son, played this small part.

Owen, the writer’s youngest son, loved the "G.I. Joe" movie series. Alongside him, King created a new character for this series, a villain known as "Crystal Ball." This figurine was released by Hasbro in 1987. By the way, this company eventually gave its new character the name "Owen King" in honor of King’s son.

But the family was not always united and peaceful. King’s addiction period had an impact on the family as well. However, Stephen overcame these difficult times, learned how to write without stimulants, and his books did not receive high praise. The environment of the house, which was full of books and ideas that seemed to appear out of nowhere, was ideal for the growth of writing skills. The fact that King’s two sons went on to become writers is no accident.

The greatest horror of 52-year-old King’s life occurred in 1999, when the children had grown up, the addiction had been overcome, and the books were being written steadily. King had died of a clinical illness.

The writer, walking along the side of the road, was hit by a car. He received a large number of injuries, including a broken spine. His right leg was broken in nine places, and so seriously that doctors thought about amputation. Fans lined up in a huge line at the medical center to donate blood for their idol. The leg was saved, but it took months to recover. Of course, King did not waste this time. In particular, he wrote a book in an unusual genre for him, “How to Write Books”. And he bought the car that hit him and destroyed it. Mostly so that it would not be put up for sale on Ebay.

Stephen King following the mishap

Stephen King"s Children

Naomi grew up in a creative atmosphere where competition reigned. No joke, writers are everywhere! The girl was very complex about both her literary abilities and her appearance. She inherited poor eyesight from her father, and a tendency to be overweight from her mother. In 1988, 18-year-old Naomi entered college at a local university. The girl did not move to the campus, formally continuing to live with her parents, but in fact spent almost all her time on campus. She organized a cafe, where, like her mother once did, baked donuts. Naomi realized her creative abilities while working at a student newspaper. And everything seemed to be going well, except that her parents were worried about the girl’s personal life, which she didn’t have.

In the year of her graduation, Naomi joined the local congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Church. And, although this congregation currently has about two hundred thousand adherents, in fact, it is a sect that does not recognize the divinity of Christ. Naomi was so imbued with the ideas of the congregation that she went to Chicago to study theology. At the age of 27, she returned home with her 53-year-old “girlfriend” named Thandeka, a supporter of the same church. Stephen was not at all happy with his daughter’s choice, but, in the end, he accepted it. In July 2000, a wedding in the traditions of the sect took place in Nashville, which was attended by Stephen and Tabitha.

As of right now, Naomi is the rector of a church in Clinton. The woman was confined to a wheelchair due to a disease that her family would rather not discuss.

Joe King after school I entered Vassar College, where I studied English literature. He dreamed of becoming a writer since childhood and made his dream come true. Since 1995, he has been engaged in literature, writing under the pseudonym Joe Hill, which he took to avoid being associated with his father. His stories were successfully published since his studies, but his debut novel, Heart-Shaped Box, was published only in 2007, when Joe was 35 years old. Even before the book was published, the film company Warner Bros bought the rights to its film adaptation. The novel received many awards, including the Bram Stoker Award. The writer"s second novel, Horns, was published in 2010. It was filmed, like some other works.

When Joe was 27, he tied the knot with Riley Dixon. Ethan King was the son of the couple. 2010 saw the couple’s divorce. Additionally, Joe surprised his parents in 2022 by giving birth to a son and a daughter, but he keeps information about his personal life private.

Like his brother, Stephen King’s youngest son Owen also earned a master’s degree in fine arts from Vassar College at the University of Maine. Owen made his debut in 2005 concurrently with his brother. "We Are All Together: Novels and Stories," his collection of short stories, was well-received. "Double Feature," his debut book, was published in 2013. Additionally, he co-wrote the book "Sleeping Beauties," which was published in 2017.

Kelly Braffet, his spouse, is a writer as well. The pair collaborates on projects together.

Stephen King, his wife Tabitha, and their three children—Naomi, 53, Joe, 51, and Owen, 46—are all 75 years old today.

He keeps writing and has committed to publishing a novel every year at the very least.

When the family gets together, he enjoys talking about his ideas with his wife and kids. Ultimately, Tabitha was the one who initially appreciated his abilities, put up with his oddities, and kept him from becoming addicted. King became known as the King horror thanks to his talent and trustworthy rear.

Elena Maksimova 15.07.23

Stephen King, who is well-known for his terrifying stories and mastery of the horror genre, devotes the same depth of thought to his fatherhood. King’s parenting style, in spite of his notoriety, is based on love and devotion, demonstrating his conviction in fostering his kids’ uniqueness and encouraging their aspirations. His life experiences and moral principles provide a distinctive viewpoint on managing a demanding career and family, demonstrating that beneath the famous writer lies a loving parent who places a high priority on his family’s development and well-being.

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Olga Sokolova

Experienced pediatrician and consultant on children's health. Interested in modern approaches to strengthening the immune system, proper nutrition and child care. I write to make life easier for moms and dads by giving proven medical advice.

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