Stephen Edward King was born in Portland Maine on September 21, 1947. Stephen has one older brother named David Victor King. When Stephen was two years old his father Donald Edwin King left his mother Nellie Pillsbury. Stephen and David were raised by their mother and relatives after their father left them. Stephen attended and graduated from Lisbon falls High School in 1966. Although, after Stephen’s father left the family moved around a lot between Connecticut and Indiana. The family was lower class and found most support family relatives. The family moved back and settled in Maine when Stephen was eleven. During which the kings cared for Nellie's parents until they unfortunately passed away. In Maine, Nellie found a job working at a mental health institution as a caregiver, and was able to bring financial security back to her family. King reports that his passion for writing started around the ages of six to seven.

In 1966, King was accepted and decided to attend the University of Maine at Orono on a scholarship. At the university King was a part of many activities including student government and politics as well as writing for the school newspaper, The Maine Campus. King graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English from the university. During his time in university King befriended many of his professors, even claiming that "Burt was the greatest English teacher I ever had. It was he who first showed me the way to the pool, which he called 'the language pool, the myth-pool, where we all go down to drink.' King already had a passion for writing but his time at university was what pushed him to write better. Later in life, King came back to the University of Maine at Orono to teach a professor.

King's mother died in 1973 at the age of 59 after a long and hard battle with cancer. King met his soon to be in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono, Tabitha Spruce, they decided to get married in 1971, a year after King graduated from university. Together they brought three beautiful children into the world, Naomi, Joe, and Owe King. Starting his professional career was hard for King, he could not find a job as a teacher, so he and Tabitha lived off his earnings as a laundry laborer until King found a job. King did prior to getting a teaching position earned some money through writing he got published in magazines. In 1971, Stephen got his first teaching job as a high school English teacher at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. King continued writing during his teaching career. During the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co. accepted King's novel Carrie for publication. Carrie was so popular that the book made it so that King could leave teaching to focus on writing new material. King moved his family from Maine to Boulder, Colorado in 1974 following the publication of Carrie. The family lived in Boulder for a little less than a year, in which Stephen began writing the shinning. The family moved back to Maine where they now currently reside. King took up a teaching position for a short period of time at the University of Maine at Orono to teach about writing and literature. In the modern day Stephen King is extremely famous; it is predicted that in the “early 1990s King’s books had sold more than 100 million”. Today it is estimated that “King’s books have sold around 350 million to 400 million copies worldwide”. King is still actively writing and publishing works in Maine during winter fall and spring, and Florida during the summer in his second home.

King has found world renowned success from his novels. His fame came with the publication of Carrie in the 70’s and has continued with commonly known novels like The Shining, The Stand, and IT. Many of King's works have been adapted into movies, musicals, tv shows, and comic books. King is, “credited with reviving the genre of horror fiction in the late 20th century.”

 King has won many awards in his life including: one Alex award, five American Audio Publishers Association awards, two American Library Association awards, two American Society of Magazine Editors awards, ten Balrog Awards, one Black Quill Award, twenty British Fantasy Society awards, one Canadian Booksellers Association Award, eleven Deutscher Phantastik Preis Awards, two Gandalf Awards, nine Goodreads awards, six Horror Guild awards, thirty three Horror Writers Association awards, one Hugo Award, twelve International Horror Guild Awards, one Italia Award, four Library Awards, one Library of Congress award, forty eight Locus Awards, one Los Angeles Times Book Award, three Mystery Writers of America awards, one National Book Foundation award, one National Endowment for the Arts award, one O. Henry Award, one PEN America award, three Quill Awards, one Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America award, one Shirley Jackson Award, one Takarajimasha award, one University of Maine award, one Us Magazine award, nineteen World Fantasy Awards, and one World Horror Convention award. King received Emmy Award nominations for outstanding miniseries but sadly did not win. King is not just a writer, but also a screenplay director.