Stephen King was a surprise to his mother. She thought she couldn’t have children so she adopted a son and named him David Victor King. Two years later Stephen Edwin King was born on September 20th, 1947, in the Portland, Maine General Hospital. His parents were Nellie Ruth Pillsbury, a housewife, and David Stansky, a sea merchant who later changed his name to Donald.
Stephen did not have an ordinary youth. King was raised by his single mother and older brother. When he was two, his father left to buy cigarettes and never returned. When he was a child, Stephen’s family was very poor. The Kings also moved a lot. They moved from Maine, to Wisconsin, to Indiana, to Connecticut. They finally settled in Durham, Maine, where Nellie moved in to take care of her sick, elderly parents. Stephen attended Durham Grammar School.
As a teenager, Stephen King was extremely tall for his age and relatively thin. He had dark, thick hair, blue eyes that were covered with spectacles, and fair skin. His mother had to work very hard to support Stephen and his brother David. King attended Lisbon Fall High School. Stephen and his older brother published their own local newspaper called “David’s Rag” in 1959. Then in 1963, Stephen and his friend Chris Chesley published 18 short stories called “People, Places, and Things–Volume I.” King and Chesley’s collection included “Hotel at the End of the Road,” “I’ve Got to Get Away! ,” “The Dimension Warp,” “The Thing at the Bottom of the Well,” “The Stranger,” “I’m Falling,” “The Cursed Expedition,” and “The Other Side of the Fog.” A year later, King’s amateur press, Triad and Gaslight Books, published a two-part book titled The Star Invaders. In 1965 Stephen King had “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber” published by a magazine called Comic Review. In 1966, Stephen King graduated high school. In an interview he said, “My high school years were undistinguished.” Stephen King was not the worst student, but definitely not the best.
As a young adult…