Happy Birthday, Stephen King!

From today's post over at The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

It's the birthday of horror novelist Stephen King, (books by this author) born in Portland, Maine (1947). He's the author of many novels, including The Shining (1977), Pet Sematary (1983), and From a Buick 8 (2002). His father, a merchant seaman, deserted the family when he was two. He has no memories of the man, but one day he found a boxful of his father's science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, including an anthology of stories from Weird Tales magazine and a book by horror author H.P. Lovecraft. That box of his father's books inspired him to start writing horror stories. After college, King worked jobs at a gas station and a Laundromat. His wife worked at Dunkin' Donuts. He said, "Budget was not exactly the word for whatever it was we were on. It was more like a modified version of the Bataan Death March."

His writing office was the furnace room of his trailer home. He sold a series of horror stories to men's magazines, and he said that the paychecks from these stories always seemed to arrive when one of his kids had an ear infection or the car had broken down. His first novel was Carrie (1973), about a weird, miserable, high school girl with psychic powers. The hard cover didn't sell very well, but when his agent called to say that the paperback rights had sold for $400,000, King couldn't believe it. He said, "The only thing I could think to do was go out and buy my wife a hair dryer."