Stephen King

Stephen King (Stephen Edwin King, born 21 September 1947 in Portland, Maine) is an American novelist and short-story writer of horror, suspense and fantasy fiction, often called the King of Horror.

His first published novel, Carrie, came out from Doubleday on 5 April 1974. 'Salem's Lot (1975), The Shining (Doubleday, 28 January 1977) and The Stand (1978) followed. Later landmarks include It (Viking, 15 September 1986), Misery (1987), which shared the first Bram Stoker Award for best novel, and The Green Mile, issued in 1996 as a six-part serial. Between 1977 and 1984 he also published five short novels as Richard Bachman, starting with Rage, until the pseudonym was exposed in 1985. His eight-volume Dark Tower sequence appeared between 1978 and 2012.

King received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003, the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award in 2007 and the National Medal of Arts in 2014.

For collectors

The Doubleday first edition of Carrie (1974) is the cornerstone of a King collection. Its first hardback printing ran to 30,000 copies, and estimates of how many actually sold range from 13,000 to 17,000, while the Signet paperback of April 1975 sold a million copies in its first year. New English Library issued the first British edition of Carrie in May 1974. Other key early firsts are 'Salem's Lot (1975), the Doubleday first of The Shining (1977) and the Viking first of It (1986).