The Man in the Ditch
On June 19, 1999, at approximately 4:30 in the afternoon, the most famous horror writer in America was lying in a ditch on Route 5 in Lovell, Maine, his right leg broken in nine places, the tibia jutting through his jeans "like the branch of a tree taken down in a thunderstorm," blood pooling in his eyes, and a forty-two-year-old man named Bryan Smith sitting on a nearby rock with a cane across his lap, looking at him with an expression of pleasant commiseration. Smith had not been watching the road. He'd been reaching into the backseat to push his Rottweiler, Bullet, away from an Igloo cooler full of meat. Smith had another Rottweiler at home named Pistol. He had nearly a dozen vehicle-related offenses on his record. He had left his campground, he later told investigators, because he wanted "some of those Mars bars they have up to the store."
Stephen King — who had, over the previous quarter-century, conjured rabid dogs, possessed automobiles, telekinetic teenagers, and a dancing clown who devours children — lay in the gravel and thought to himself that he had nearly been killed by a character out of one of his own novels. "It's almost funny," he wrote later. Smith, for his part, offered his own review of King's career from the roadside: "I've never had so much as a parking ticket in my life, and here it is my bad luck to hit the bestselling writer in the world." Then he added: "I loved all your movies."
The spectacles knocked from King's face during the impact were bent and twisted, but the lenses were unbroken. He would wear those same lenses while writing the final pages of
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, the book about his life and his art that he'd been working on when Smith's Dodge van crested the hill. If there was a bone on the right side of his body, King told Terry Gross, it was broken — "with the exception of my head, which was only concussed." Less than a year later, Bryan Smith was found dead in his home from an accidental overdose. The van was quietly purchased by King's family, reduced to a cube by a car crusher, and disappeared from the earth. King went on writing. He has always gone on writing. The question — the only question that has ever really mattered about Stephen King — is why.
By the Numbers
The King Empire
350M+Books sold worldwide
65+Novels published
238'Based on' screen credits on IMDb
$6,400Annual teaching salary when Carrie sold
$400KCarrie paperback advance (1974)
2,000Daily word count target
50+Years of continuous publication
A Small House in Durham
The mythic origin story of Stephen King has the structural simplicity of a folktale, and like most folktales, what it conceals is more instructive than what it reveals.
Donald Edwin King — born circa 1913 in Peru, Indiana, under the surname Pollock, a merchant mariner who adopted the name King — married Nellie Ruth Pillsbury on July 23, 1939, in Cumberland County, Maine. They had two sons: David, the elder, and Stephen Edwin, born September 21, 1947, in Portland. When Stephen was two, Donald left the family. He went out to buy a pack of cigarettes, as the legend sometimes goes, and simply never returned. Nellie Ruth was left to raise two boys alone, and she did it the way women of her generation and geography did: by moving in with relatives, taking whatever work came, and refusing to discuss the man who had gone. The boys bounced between Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Stratford, Connecticut, before Ruth King brought them back to Maine, to Durham, when Stephen was eleven. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with age. Ruth's sisters persuaded her to take over their physical care. Other family members provided a small house and financial support.
The small house in Durham. That's where the story really starts. Not in a Gothic mansion or a haunted hotel, but in an underfurnished home where a single mother worked in the kitchens of Pineland, a residential facility for the mentally challenged, and where a boy with bad eyes and flat feet and punctured eardrums — every one of those ailments later documented by a draft board that classified him 4-F — read comic books and then horror novels and then began, at seven years old, to write his own stories, copying panels and then making things up. Ruth King had a saying for when her boys were scared: "Whatever you're afraid of, say it three times fast and it will never happen." Her son would build one of the most extraordinary careers in American letters on precisely that principle.
What we know about Donald King is almost nothing. What we know about his absence is everything.
The Village Vomit and the Lisbon Enterprise
There are two kinds of education in King's life, and they happened almost simultaneously.
The first was formal: Lisbon Falls High School, then the University of Maine at Orono, where he wrote a weekly column for the student newspaper, The Maine Campus, served in the Student Senate, came to oppose the Vietnam War "from a conservative view that the war was unconstitutional," and graduated in 1970 with a B.A. in English and a teaching certificate. The university was where he met Tabitha Spruce, in the stacks of the Fogler Library, where they both worked as students. It was where he sold his first professional short story, "The Glass Floor," to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967, for a sum so small it barely registered as income.
The second education was more violent and more useful. When King was a sophomore at Lisbon Falls High, he wrote and published a small satiric newspaper called The Village Vomit, in which he lampooned several teachers with what he later admitted were "not very gentle lampoons; they ranged from the scatological to the downright cruel." He was dragged into the principal's office — "a fourteen-year-old kid who was shaking in his boots" — forced to make apologies that "tasted like dog-dirt in my mouth," and sentenced to a week of detention. But the guidance counselor, seeing something in the kid, arranged for him to try writing sports for the Lisbon Enterprise, a twelve-page weekly.
The editor of the Enterprise was a man named John Gould — not the famous New England humorist, but a relative. Gould offered King half a cent per word. King brought in his first feature, and Gould took a large black pen to it and, in King's telling, "taught me all I ever needed to know about my craft." In ten minutes. The lesson was about eliminating unnecessary words, about writing with the door closed and then rewriting with the door open, about the difference between the story you tell yourself and the story you tell others. It was the most consequential editorial encounter of King's life, and it happened because a fourteen-year-old couldn't resist being cruel in print and a guidance counselor thought punishment should include a second chance.
King has told this story so many times it has the worn smoothness of a river stone, but the essential paradox remains: the same impulse that got him in trouble — the compulsion to take what he observed about human weakness and set it down in language sharper than anyone expected — was the impulse that made him a writer. The Village Vomit was not a detour. It was a rehearsal.
The Trash Can and the Trailer
In the fall of 1971, Stephen and Tabitha King were married. She was a writer too — would go on to publish novels of her own — and for a time they lived on what they could scrape together: his earnings from an industrial laundry, her student loan and savings, the occasional $200 or $300 from a short story sold to a men's magazine. King took a job teaching high school English at Hampden Academy, the public school in Hampden, Maine, for $6,400 a year. They lived in a trailer in Hermon. He wrote in the evenings and on weekends, in a small room, on a child's desk he'd propped up in the laundry area.
Carrie White was born in that laundry room, or nearly wasn't. The idea came from two sources King has named precisely: a brief stint working as a janitor at a high school, where he noticed that the girls' shower room had no individual stalls, and an article in Life magazine proposing that girls might be susceptible to telekinetic powers at the onset of menstruation. The protagonist was a composite of two girls he had known growing up — girls who were bullied, isolated, strange in the way that draws cruelty from other children the way an open wound draws flies.
He wrote three pages and threw them away. The prose felt wrong to him. He couldn't find the girl's voice. It was Tabitha who pulled the pages out of the trash can, read them, and told him to keep going.
This is the most famous rescue in American popular fiction, and it deserves a moment's attention beyond the anecdote. Consider what Tabitha saw: not a finished product, not even a promising draft, but three discarded pages of a story about a menstruating girl with telekinetic powers, written by a man who wasn't sure he could write convincingly from a female perspective. She read those pages and said, in effect: I believe this can be something. That act of faith — not in the manuscript but in her husband's capacity to become the writer the manuscript required — is the hinge on which everything else turns. Without it, King might have gone on teaching at Hampden Academy, selling the occasional short story, perhaps eventually finishing a novel that was less commercially explosive. With it, Carrie was completed, submitted to Doubleday, and accepted.
In the spring of 1973, on Mother's Day, King received a call from his new editor at Doubleday, Bill Thompson — a man whose own quiet conviction about King's talent had been essential in getting the book through the editorial gauntlet. Thompson told King that a major paperback sale would provide him with the means to leave teaching and write full-time. The paperback advance was $400,000, split evenly between King and Doubleday. For a family living in a trailer on a teacher's salary, it was the kind of money that doesn't compute. King called Tabitha at the restaurant where she was working. He reportedly couldn't speak at first.
Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don't have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
Paul Stearns, then a senior in King's fantasy and science fiction elective at Hampden Academy, remembers the day his teacher walked into class with a big grin and announced he'd sold Carrie to a publisher. "We all went, 'Oh, yeah right, sure you did,'" Stearns recalled. "Sure enough, a few days later, Mr. King drives up to school in a new car. And we all said, 'Boy, I guess he was telling the truth.' Little did we know how big it was all going to get."
Carrie was published on April 5, 1974. It was an immediate bestseller. Brian De Palma's film adaptation, starring Sissy Spacek, followed in 1976. King was twenty-six when the book was published. He would not stop publishing for the next half-century.
The Overlook, the Boiler, and the Man in the Mirror
The Kings left Maine for Boulder, Colorado, in the fall of 1974. They stayed less than a year, but the Rocky Mountains left a permanent scar on King's imagination. Late in September, Stephen and Tabitha checked into the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park — "a grand old hotel," King called it — and found they were the only guests. The place was closing for winter the following day. That night, wandering the empty corridors, King thought it seemed "the perfect — maybe the archetypical — setting for a ghost story." He dreamed of his three-year-old son running through the hallways, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming, being chased by a fire hose. He woke drenched in sweat, within an inch of falling out of bed.
That night he solidified the bones of The Shining.
The novel, published in 1977, is about a man named Jack Torrance — aspiring writer, recovering alcoholic, former prep-school teacher who once broke his own son's arm "while trying to discipline him" — who takes a job as winter caretaker of the remote Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains. His wife, Wendy, hopes the isolation will help their marriage. His five-year-old son, Danny, has psychic abilities he doesn't fully understand. The hotel, which has a long history of murder and corruption, is alive, and it wants the boy. It gets to him through his father.
Here is what King understood only later: he had written a book about himself.
"I had written The Shining about myself," he said. The act of writing it was "a kind of self-psychoanalysis," a form of catharsis. Jack Torrance's alcoholism was King's alcoholism. Jack's rage was King's rage. Jack's terror of what he might do to his family was King's own private horror. The Overlook Hotel, with its old unstable boiler building pressure in the basement, is one of the great metaphors in American fiction — and the metaphor was personal. The boiler was what happened when you drank a case of beer a night, which King later admitted was his consumption in the late 1970s, and then you sat alone in a room and wrote about your worst fears, and the fears got realer than the fiction.
The hotel burns at the end of the novel. Danny remembers what his father forgot: the boiler hasn't been checked. The pressure builds. Everything explodes. It is a story about the destruction of a family, and the thing that saves the child is knowledge his father was too far gone to retain. There is no more autobiographical moment in King's work, and none he would recognize as such for years.
Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film adaptation — Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, those terrible twins, "Here's Johnny!" — became one of the most celebrated horror films ever made. King hated it. "Jack Torrance, in the movie, seems crazy from the jump," he told Playboy in 1983. "If the guy is nuts to begin with, then the entire tragedy of his downfall is wasted." He took particular exception to Duvall's portrayal of Wendy: "Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film. She's basically just there to scream and be stupid, and that's not the woman that I wrote about." He once called the character "a screaming dishrag."
The disagreement between King and Kubrick over The Shining is one of the great aesthetic arguments of the late twentieth century, and it centers on a question neither man could quite articulate: Is horror about the loss of control, or about the recognition that control was always an illusion? King believed Jack Torrance was a good man who lost his way. Kubrick believed the darkness was there from the start. The novelist insisted on tragedy. The filmmaker insisted on fate. They were both right, which is why the argument has never been settled.
The Boys in the Basement
King's theory of creativity is anti-romantic in the most deliberate way. He doesn't believe in the muse as a floating feminine sprite sprinkling inspired dust. He believes in what he calls "the boys in the basement" — blue-collar guys who sit around drinking beer, telling dirty jokes, and polishing their bowling trophies. Every now and then you go downstairs and ask if they have an idea. The guy looks at you and says, "Yeah, here it is. Now go get to work and don't bother me anymore."
This is a joke, and it isn't. King writes every day, for three to four hours, typically from eight in the morning until around noon. He aims for approximately 2,000 words per day. He does not take days off. "I have to work every day because I have to keep it fresh," he has said. "If you take a few days off, it all starts to look kind of tacky — like an old campaign poster that's running in the rain." He compares the writing state to a trance, a post-hypnotic suggestion triggered by routine: sit in the same chair, at the same time, and the subconscious opens like a door.
The method has produced more than sixty novels, hundreds of short stories, screenplays, teleplays, columns, and one book about writing that the Cleveland Plain Dealer called "the best book on writing ever." The output is so vast it seems inhuman, and yet the process King describes is almost monastic in its simplicity. Write the first draft with the door closed. Put it in a drawer. Wait at least six weeks. Then rewrite with the door open. Let the characters lead. "I think the most important thing about storytelling," he told Reddit in 2013, "is to let the characters lead, and not try to force them into things they don't want to do."
His descriptions of how stories begin are similarly unpretentious. "Sometimes it starts with an image," he said. "With JOYLAND, I kept coming back to a boy in a wheelchair flying a kite on the beach. Eventually I looked farther down the beach and saw an amusement park." With Gerald's Game, it started with the concept of a woman chained to a bed — what would happen if you had one character in one room? With It, the genesis was even simpler: walking across a wooden bridge in a Boulder, Colorado park, musing about trolls.
When I have a good idea, I just know. It's like if you have a bunch of cut-glass goblets set up and you're hitting them with a spoon. Clunk, clunk, clunk. And then one goes ding.
What's remarkable is not the simplicity of the process but King's refusal to mystify it. In an era when literary authors cultivate tortured images of creative suffering, King cheerfully admits he's "pulling stuff out of my ass all the time. It's called 'creativity.'" When a Reddit user questioned a fictional weapon in The Stand, King's response was characteristically blunt: "Gun people get awfully pissy about invention, I've noticed."
The only thing King says he cannot do is wait out writer's block. "The only thing you can do with writer's block is wait it out. Sometimes a few stories just die. There's no explaining it. It goes with the territory." He keeps the dead stories in his right desk drawer. He doesn't look in there.
The Bachman Books, or The Problem of Being Stephen King
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, King began publishing novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The official reason was commercial: his publishers believed the market could absorb only one King novel per year, and he was writing far more than that. But the deeper reason was experimental. King wanted to know if it was him or the name. Could a Stephen King novel succeed without Stephen King's name on it?
The Bachman books — Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man (1982), Thinner (1984) — are leaner, meaner, more overtly political than much of King's horror work. They sold modestly. Then a Washington, D.C., bookstore clerk named Steve Brown noticed stylistic similarities between Bachman and King, did some detective work at the Library of Congress, and exposed the pseudonym. King admitted everything in an essay titled "Why I Was Bachman," and published the first four novels together under his own name in 1985.
The experiment had answered his question, and the answer was not entirely flattering. Bachman's books sold in the thousands. King's sold in the millions. The name mattered more than the work. King processed this information the way he processes most things — by turning it into fiction. Misery (1987), written shortly after the Bachman unmasking, is about a bestselling novelist held captive by his "number one fan," a woman who forces him to write what she wants him to write. Annie Wilkes, the captor, is one of the great monsters in American fiction. King later admitted, in an interview with Rolling Stone, that "Annie Wilkes is cocaine. She was my number-one fan." The metaphor folds in on itself: the audience, the addiction, the imprisonment by your own success — they're all the same cage.
The Case of Beer and the Intervention
By the mid-1980s, Stephen King was drinking a case of beer a night, smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, and doing cocaine. He was angry and depressed. He had written novels he barely remembered writing — Cujo (1981) and The Tommyknockers (1987) among them. He was, in his own retrospective assessment, entertaining suicidal thoughts. He had a twenty-four-room house, hundreds of millions of books in circulation, and the kind of fame that caused strangers to cluster outside his home hoping for autographs. None of it registered as happiness.
The intervention came from Tabitha. Again. She gathered King's family and friends. She emptied his study trash can onto the floor in front of him: beer cans, cigarette butts, cocaine paraphernalia, cough syrup bottles, NyQuil bottles, mouthwash bottles. "She told me I was going to kill myself if I didn't stop," he has recounted in various forms. In the late 1980s, King got sober, a day at a time, and has remained so.
"What would I tell my twenty-year-old self?" King said in 2024, for Esquire. "Stay away from dope and stay away from booze. Because you have a tendency to go too far."
The division of King's career into pre-sobriety and post-sobriety periods is a favorite game of literary critics, and King himself has played it: "As far as dope and booze goes, I'd like to have some of those early books back," he told a Reddit user in 2013. "They're not bad, but could have been better. For the record, most of the work was done straight and sober." That last sentence is important. The myth of the substance-fueled genius — Hemingway with his whiskey, Kerouac with his benzedrine — King dismisses as romantic nonsense. The work was always the work. The drugs were just what was happening at the same time.
What changed after sobriety was not the quality of the prose so much as the nature of the concerns. The later novels — Dolores Claiborne (1993), Lisey's Story (2006), 11/22/63 (2011), Fairy Tale (2022) — are more psychologically nuanced, more interested in character than in creature, more willing to dwell in the mundane spaces where horror lives not as a supernatural visitation but as the ordinary cruelty of the world. King himself identified this shift: "In his later fiction, exemplified by Dolores Claiborne, King has departed from the horror genre to provide sharply detailed psychological portraits of his protagonists, many of them women, who confront difficult and challenging circumstances." He was still the same writer. The boiler in the basement had simply been checked.
Derry, Maine, and the Geography of Fear
There is no understanding Stephen King without understanding Maine — not the postcard Maine of lobster traps and lighthouses, but the other Maine, the one with the endless woods and no cell phone service, the one-stoplight towns where everybody knows your business and nobody talks about the bad things that happen in the dark. King has lived in Maine for most of his life. He chose Bangor — over Portland, over anywhere else he could have afforded to go — because it was, in his words, "a tougher, harder place, with its history of loggers, the thing about the Brady Gang shoot-out, and all those fightin' bars like the Silver Dollar that used to be down at the waterfront."
Derry, the fictional town that recurs throughout his novels, is Bangor with the dial turned slightly toward nightmare. The Kenduskeag Stream canals, the Thomas Hill Standpipe, specific residential neighborhoods — all transplanted into fiction with the fidelity of a map and the distortion of a fever dream. The idea for It came to him in Boulder, Colorado, but he knew immediately the story had to be set in Maine. "Unlike Boulder," he explained, "Maine towns and cities have histories going back hundreds of years."
This is not mere regional loyalty. King's insistence on Maine as his primary setting is a philosophical choice about where horror belongs. It belongs at home. It belongs in the place you think you know. "The more out of touch a place is," he told a Reddit user, "the more likely that strange things might happen and go unobserved by the outside world." The horror is not that something terrible arrives from elsewhere. The horror is that the terrible thing has always been here, in the place you thought was safe, and nobody talked about it.
When Stephen and Tabitha moved into their house on West Broadway in Bangor in 1980, the parlor seemed cold "in a way that had little to do with temperature." The cat wouldn't enter the room. The children avoided it. The oldest son was convinced there were ghosts in the turret towers. Then, months later, a rubber ball appeared on the parlor floor. Then toy soldiers on the sofa. Then Tabitha, curled up reading a Dorothy Sayers mystery with the cat in her lap. "I thought that maybe the house had decided to accept us," King wrote — and in that sentence is the entire emotional architecture of his work. The house decides. The place has agency. You don't haunt it; it haunts you.
The Proletarian Novelist
The literary establishment's relationship with Stephen King has been one of the more revealing cultural embarrassments of the past half-century. For decades, the attitude was simple condescension: King sold too many books to be taken seriously. His prose was "undisciplined and inelegant." He wrote horror, which was not literature. He was, at best, a competent entertainer; at worst, a hack who had gotten spectacularly lucky.
King was aware of this and, for the most part, found it more amusing than wounding. "I'm a proletarian novelist," he told the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2015. "Writers are actually supposed to be secret agents and we go along and see stuff and kind of record it." He has described himself as the literary equivalent of a blue-collar worker, a man who clocks in and does his job, and he has worn that identity with a stubbornness that borders on provocation. He lives in Bangor, not Brooklyn. His office is on a dreary dead-end road, next to a gun-and-ammo store, a snowplow dealership, and a cemetery. He eats doughnuts that leave powdered sugar on his black turtleneck. He plays guitar in a band of fellow authors. His favorite musical act is Creedence Clearwater Revival.
The tide began to turn in 2003, when the National Book Foundation awarded King the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The choice was controversial — some literary grandees objected loudly — but the ceremony itself was a kind of coronation. Walter Mosley, introducing King, spoke about the Foundation's commitment to literacy and literature. King's acceptance speech was characteristically direct: he asked the literary world to widen its definition of what counted as serious work.
In 2015, President Obama awarded King the National Medal of Arts. By then, the critical reassessment was well underway. The novels that had been dismissed were being taught in universities. The Shawshank Redemption, based on a novella from the 1982 collection Different Seasons, was routinely cited as one of the greatest films ever made. The Stand had become a touchstone for pandemic fiction. It — both Curry's 1990 television miniseries and Muschietti's 2017 theatrical version, which became the highest-grossing horror film of all time on a modest $30 million budget — had embedded itself in the collective unconscious of an entire generation.
People often forget the breadth of Stephen's work and therefore the resulting breadth of adaptations. We think of Stephen often as a horror author, but that is still sort of the ghetto-ization of the genre, and the relegation of a pretty terrific literary artist.
King's response to the recognition has been characteristically deflective. "As far as high achievements, that's for other people to decide," he told Reddit. "I try to keep myself amused. Every day I do that is a good day."
The Telepathy of the Page
"What is writing?" King asks in On Writing. "Telepathy, of course."
The book — part memoir, part manual, part survival story — was completed while King recovered from the injuries inflicted by Bryan Smith's van. It is, in its plainspoken way, one of the great American books about vocation. King's central argument is that writing is a craft, not an art, and that like all crafts it can be taught, practiced, and improved through discipline and attention. The toolbox metaphor he employs — vocabulary on the top shelf, grammar beneath it, elements of style below that — is deliberately unglamorous. He doesn't want you to think of writing as a mystical calling. He wants you to think of it as carpentry.
And yet the book's most famous passage is about magic. King asks the reader to imagine a table — he specifies a red cloth, a cage, a rabbit, the number eight in blue ink — and then notes that the image has been transmitted across years, across space, from his mind to yours, through nothing but ink on paper. "We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room," he writes, "except we are together. We're close. We're having a meeting of the minds."
This is the paradox at the heart of King's career: the blue-collar craftsman who also happens to be a medium. The man who insists writing is hard work and daily practice, who eats doughnuts and plays "Louie Louie" on guitar (E, A, and D — "rinse and repeat; the lyrics are entirely up to you"), is also the man who transmits terror across distance and time with a precision that suggests something beyond skill. When a reader on Reddit told King his books had kept him alive through chronic pain — "there were many nights when I couldn't fall asleep for the pain, and on hundreds of those nights I only found the will to live to dawn because I wanted to know what happened next" — King's response was characteristically compressed: "I'm glad that my books helped with the pain during that part of your life." No false modesty. No grandiosity. An acknowledgment, worker to worker.
The Answer Man, Forty-Five Years Later
In the late 1970s, Stephen King was staying at the U.N. Plaza Hotel in New York when he began a short story about a young man who encounters a stranger on the road — a figure who calls himself the Answer Man and offers to answer three questions for $25 within a five-minute window. King wrote six pages and stopped. The story went into a drawer, and King forgot about it.
Forty-five years later, his nephew John Leonard was going through King's papers for an archival project — desk drawers, wastebaskets, every hiding place in a workspace belonging to a man who describes himself as "not exactly a very organized person" — and found the unfinished manuscript. "You know, this is pretty good," Leonard told his uncle. "You really ought to finish this."
King read what he had written nearly half a century earlier and discovered he now knew how to end it. The finished story, "The Answer Man," became part of the 2024 collection You Like It Darker. King described the experience as "calling into a canyon of time." He structured the completed version in three acts — the questioner as a young man, as middle-aged, as old — and in doing so performed, in miniature, the trick of his entire career: he took the fears and uncertainties of one age and held them up against the wisdom and losses of another, and the resonance between the two was the story.
"I found out — to sort of my delight and sort of my horror — that you can't really gross out the American public," King told NPR in 2024. He was seventy-six. He was still writing every morning, still walking the dog, still claiming his chair. "Fame is a pain in the ass," he told Esquire that same year. "The older you get, the more of a pain in the ass it is. But you have to realize that it comes with the territory." The Spanish saying he invoked — "God says, 'Take what you want and pay for it'" — might serve as an epitaph for his whole career, except that epitaphs are for people who have stopped, and King has not stopped.
His worst fear, he said, is Alzheimer's disease. Not death. Not pain. The loss of the thing that makes the work possible.
What You Pass On
In May 2001, Stephen King stood before the graduating class of Vassar College — his sons Joe (Class of '95) and Owen (Class of '99) had both attended — and delivered a commencement address that was, beneath its characteristic humor, a sermon. He told them about lying in the ditch on Route 5. He told them about the tibia poking through his jeans. He told them, "I had a MasterCard in my wallet, but when you're lying in the ditch with broken glass in your hair, no one accepts MasterCard."
Then he told them something else. "We come in naked and broke. We may be dressed when we go out, but we're just as broke." Whatever money and power they accumulated in their lives, they would die broke. The only thing that would last was what they passed on. He announced a $20,000 gift, in honor of the Class of 2001, to Dutchess Outreach, a Poughkeepsie-based organization helping people in need, and asked the audience to match it.
King and Tabitha have given away enormous sums over the years — funding public libraries, fire departments, youth sports programs, and nonprofits across Maine. The house on West Broadway in Bangor, where they lived for nearly four decades, was recently converted into the headquarters of their charitable foundation, which will also house King's archives and a future writer's retreat. The famous wrought-iron gate with its ornamental bats and dragon — the one that draws busloads of tourists and nearly 4,000 annual visitors to SK Tours of Maine — now guards not a private residence but a public trust.
"I give," King told the Vassar graduates, "because it's the only concrete way I have of saying that I'm glad to be alive and that I can earn my daily bread doing what I love."
His children became writers. Joe Hill — born Joseph Hillström King — is a bestselling novelist who deliberately published under a pseudonym to avoid riding on his father's name, a decision that echoes the Bachman experiment in reverse. Owen King is a novelist too; in 2017, father and son co-wrote Sleeping Beauties, a novel about women who become wrapped in cocoons when they fall asleep. Naomi King became a Unitarian Universalist minister. The family plays a game — Joe's idea — where someone devises a scenario in which a protagonist is in trouble and everyone else has to write a suspenseful ending on the spot.
King's favorite of his own novels is Lisey's Story, published in 2006. It is about a woman grieving the death of her famous-novelist husband, reliving their shared history, discovering truths about his secret inner life. It is, by King's own implicit admission, the book closest to the marriage that has sustained him for more than fifty years — the marriage that began in the library stacks, survived the trailer park and the cocaine and the van on Route 5, and endures in a house in Maine where the cat eventually settled into the parlor.
The lenses from the spectacles Bryan Smith knocked off Stephen King's face on June 19, 1999 — bent frames, unbroken glass — are the lenses through which King wrote the final chapters of On Writing. He mentions this detail once, in passing, and then moves on. It is, like everything in his work, a small thing made monstrous by proximity to the real. The glass that survived the impact. The eyes that kept seeing. The hands that never stopped typing.
