 Fame & Fortune: Stephen King
A Halloween visit with the king of all things scary
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Stephen King's nightmares may be born in America, but their universal appeal has made him one of the most widely read and recognized authors worldwide.
During the Vietnam era, Maine's most famous resident and native son combined one part Ray Bradbury and one part Rod Serling to craft a new vision of horror stories wrapped in working-class values and beating with a rock-and-roll soundtrack.
King's uncanny ability to tap into our primal fears led to the 1974 publication of "Carrie." Its runaway success in paperback, combined with the hit Brian De Palma film starring a young Sissy Spacek, enabled the struggling young English teacher to lose his day job and concentrate on scaring the masses.
And boy, did he. With such goose bump-producing, multimedia hits as "Cujo," "The Shining," "Pet Cemetery," "It" and "Misery," King truly was the king of all media long before Howard Stern co-opted the title.
Real horror interrupted King's life in 1999 when the
author was struck, and nearly killed by a minivan, while walking
along a Maine country road near his home. The undiagnosed collapse
of his lung nearly cost him his life during a bout with pneumonia
two years later.
King's brush with death made headlines worldwide and prompted many to wonder: Will he ever write at peak form again, and if so, what might his fertile imagination create out of his own near-death encounter?
His 2006 novel, "Lisey's Story" is our answer. At once King's most personal and most playful novel, it examines the quarter-century marriage of bestselling novelist Scott Landon through the eyes of his widow Lisey, two years after her husband's death. The book is dedicated to Tabitha, his wife and fellow novelist.
Now fit and busy as ever at 59, King talked with Bankrate about his teaching years, the price of fame and the value of a solid work ethic.
Bankrate: Do you look back on your struggling years with nostalgia?
Stephen King: Do I have
nostalgia? I have nostalgia for my youth; I think anybody does who
remembers times when they were healthy and young and in love and
making their mark. There are a lot of things that I remember that
I don't have a lot of nostalgia for, and that is times when I was
working with laundry or driving a truck or pumping gas and thinking,
you know, I don't know if I'm ever going to get out of this. You've
got a couple kids, you're working hard but….
Bankrate: How did you make ends meet?
King: I can remember coming home one day, I was working two jobs, teaching school and working in the summer in the New Franklin laundry to make ends meet, and having my wife say, "Give me your wallet." And I gave her my wallet. And at this time -- this was the early 1970s -- everybody was giving out credit cards, you didn't need to apply or anything, they just sent their plastic everywhere, and she took the gasoline credit cards and she had these shears and she cut them all up. And I said, but we're paying our bills, and she said, "No, we're paying the interest. We can't afford to anymore. We've got to pay as we go." She understood.
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