Author
Stephen King
American · Author · 1947
Stephen King was born in 1947 in Portland, Maine. In our universe, his wife Tabitha retrieved the manuscript of Carrie from a wastebasket in early 1973 and told him not to throw it away; in Earth-516, she did not. The manuscript was discarded. King continued teaching at Hampden Academy through the 1970s and then at a high school in Lisbon Falls into the 1980s. He published short fiction occasionally — seven stories appeared in small magazines between 1971 and 1984 — but no novel. Through the early 1980s he drank heavily. He has described this period as "eighteen years of pressure behind the eyes that never broke." He got sober in 1987. He began The Long Dark in October 1988 at his kitchen table, without telling his wife what he was writing. He finished it in January 1991. After the novel's unexpected success, King gave one interview to the Paris Review in 1992, then declined all further requests. He continued teaching until his retirement in 2003. He never wrote another book. He has said this was not a decision but a fact: "I put everything I had in that one place. There wasn't anything left to put anywhere else." He lives in Bangor, Maine.
