Stephen King | Author Backstories

Other Worlds Than These

The Talisman, book 3 · Novel · 2026

The third and last Talisman novel, written with Peter Straub, who died in 2022, and published by Scribner on October 6, 2026.³⁴ Before he died, Straub sent King an idea for a new Jack Sawyer novel.⁶

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At a glance

Born

Stephen Edwin King, September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine⁹

Education

University of Maine at Orono, B.A. in English, 1970¹

Before writing full time

Industrial laundry worker; high school English teacher at Hampden Academy¹

Pen name

Richard Bachman⁸¹⁰

Married

The novelist Tabitha King, in January 1971¹⁵

Major awards

Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (National Book Foundation), 2003¹
Edgar Award for Best Novel, 2015, for Mr. Mercedes¹⁶

Stephen King's Backstory

Early life

Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King.⁹¹ His parents separated when he was a toddler, and his mother raised him and his older brother, David, partly in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Stratford, Connecticut, before the family returned for good to Durham, Maine, when he was eleven.¹ He graduated from Lisbon Falls High School in 1966 and earned a B.A. in English at the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, writing a weekly column for the student newspaper.¹ His first professional story sale, “The Glass Floor,” appeared in 1967.¹

Teaching and Carrie

He married Tabitha Spruce, whom he met at the university library, in January 1971.¹ While he looked for a teaching job he worked in an industrial laundry, and in the fall of 1971 he began teaching high-school English at Hampden Academy, selling stories to men’s magazines on the side.¹ Doubleday accepted his novel Carrie in the spring of 1973 for a $2,500 advance; the paperback rights later sold for $400,000, which let him leave teaching to write full time.¹²¹ Carrie was published in the spring of 1974, and the family spent the following year in Boulder, Colorado, where he wrote The Shining.¹

Richard Bachman

Beginning with Rage in 1977, he published several novels under the name Richard Bachman.⁸ He confirmed in 1985 that he was Bachman, after a reader contacted his publisher about the similarity in style, and that year he published the first four Bachman novels under his own name as The Bachman Books.¹⁰¹¹ Later books also appeared as Bachman, among them The Regulators (1996) and Blaze (2007).⁸

Career

From the late 1970s he published novels, story collections and novellas at a steady pace, among them The Stand, It, Misery and the seven-book Dark Tower series, completed in 2004.⁸ He has written with other authors: The Talisman and Black House with Peter Straub, Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and the Gwendy books with Richard Chizmar.⁸ In 2014 he began a crime trilogy with Mr. Mercedes, which won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 2015; the Mystery Writers of America had named him a Grand Master in 2007.¹⁶¹⁷ In 2003 he received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.¹ He also directed one film, Maximum Overdrive (1985).¹

The accident and On Writing

On June 19, 1999, he was struck by a van while walking on the shoulder of Route 5 in Lovell, Maine; his injuries included a collapsed lung, a broken hip and multiple leg fractures that needed several operations.¹³ While he recovered he finished On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, published in 2000, which includes his account of the accident.¹⁴¹³ AARP notes that he struggled with alcohol for years and has been sober for decades.¹⁵

Recent work

His recent books include the Holly Gibney novel Never Flinch (2025) and Hansel and Gretel (2025), a retelling illustrated with art by Maurice Sendak.⁵² In October 2026 Scribner published Other Worlds Than These, the final Talisman novel, completed after Straub’s death in 2022.³⁴ He lives in Maine with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King.⁵

Fun facts

His first professional sale was a short story, "The Glass Floor," published in Startling Mystery Stories in 1967.¹

Doubleday paid a $2,500 advance for Carrie; the paperback rights later sold for $400,000.¹²

He wrote The Shining during a year the family spent in Boulder, Colorado.¹

He directed one film, Maximum Overdrive (1985), from his own screenplay based on his story "Trucks."¹

He called Rob Reiner's Stand by Me "the best film ever made out of anything I've written."¹⁸

The Mystery Writers of America made him a Grand Master in 2007, eight years before his Edgar for Best Novel.¹⁷

About a third of his novels, novellas and short stories have been adapted for the screen, according to a 2020 tally published by Yahoo News.¹⁹

Books

In order of first publication. Each series is kept together, in reading order, starting where its first book appeared. Titles and years from Wikipedia's Stephen King bibliography, with books from 2025 and 2026 from the publisher and stephenking.com.⁸⁵³²

1974

Carrie

Novel

His first published novel; Doubleday paid a $2,500 advance.¹²

Other Worlds Than These

At a glance

Stephen King's Backstory

Early life

Teaching and Carrie

Richard Bachman

Career

The accident and On Writing

Recent work

Fun facts

Books

The Shining

The Dark Tower

The Talisman

Bill Hodges

Gwendy

Latest news

Adaptations and other media

Film

Television

Timeline

What's next

Sources