KING (b. Sept. 21, 1947, Portland, Maine, U.S.), American novelist and short-story writer whose many novels and story collections, and the numberous films adapted from this large body of work, have established his reputation as the leading author of horror fictions in contemporary literature, and with reviving the genre of horror fiction in the late 20th century.
King graduated from the University of Maine in 1970 with a bachelor's degree in English. While writing short stories he supported himself by teaching and working as a janitor, among other jobs. His first published novel, Carrie (filmed 1976), about a tormented teenage girl, Carrie White, gifted with telekinetic powers. Abused by a fanatically religious mother and ridiculed by her classmates. After suffering an act of the worst degradation, she destroys the town with her strange powers, appeared in 1974 and was an immediate popular success. Carrie was the first of many novels in which King blended horror, the macabre, fantasy, and science fiction.

Among such works were Salem's Lot (1975),an equally nihilistic novel, which portrays a small Maine village overrun and repopulated by vampires. The Shining (1977; filmed 1980), a writer, his wife, and their young son act as winter caretakers in a ghost-ridden hotel. The writer goes mad and tries to murder his wife and child but only destroys himself. The Stand (1978), The Dead Zone (1979; filmed 1983), Firestarter (1980; filmed 1984), Cujo (1981), Christine (1983; filmed 1983), It (1986), Misery (1987; filmed 1990), The Tommyknockers (1987), and The Dark Half (1989).
In his books King explored almost every terror-producing theme imaginable, from vampires, rabid dogs, deranged killers, and a pyromaniac to ghosts, extrasensory perception and telekinesis, biological warfare, and even a malevolent automobile. Though his work was disparaged as undisciplined and inelegant, King was a talented storyteller whose books gain their effect from realistic detail, forceful plotting, and the author's undoubted ability to involve and scare the reader. King's stories reverberate with subtexts.
Carrie resonates with a residule dread of the women's liberation movement. Salem's lot reflects America's post-Watergate fear that corruption exists on every level of society. In The Shining the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel seem to ebb and surge in response to the growing pathology of the caretaker, and the hedge maze poses as an anlog of mind, tortued by writer's block and social isolation. Thinner (1984), published under the pseudonym ''Richard Bachman,'' juxtoposes conspicous consumption with the curse of anorexia nervosa. King typically adapts his metaphors from the stock repertoire of horror fiction. Weight loss in 'Thinner' is brought on by a gypsy's curse. IT (1986) shows childhood fears in the form of such classic Universal Studio movie monsters as Frankenstein, Wolfman, and the Mummy. In Misery (1987) King, not hesitating to be self-referential, pictures a successful writer kidnapped by a crazily devoted fan. The Dark Half (1989) ficionalizes his use of the ''Richard Bachman'' pseudonym, as a horror writer's pen name becomes a threat to his existence.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 the lost jobs, disintegrating families, mental breakdown, and all the other fears that haunt the atomic age. His novels vindicate the dreads of that age. By the early 1990s King's books had sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, and his name had become synonymous with the genre of horror fiction. King also wrote the short stories collected in Night Shift (1978), as well as several novellas and motion-picture screenplays. Some of his novels were successfully adapted for the screen by such directors as Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, and Rob Reiner.

Aleister Crowley - Anne Rice - Anton Szandor LaVey - Arthur Schopenhauer - Charles Baudelaire - Charles Darwin - Edgar Allan Poe - Friedrich Nietzsche - Howard Phillips Lovecraft - J.R.R. Tolkien - Karl Marx - Lord Byron - Marquis de Sade - Mary Shelley - Sigmund Freud - Stephen King