Misery
Extras
About the Author
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. King made his first professional short story sale The Glass Floor to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many of these were later gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In 1973, Doubleday & Co. accepted his first novel, Carrie, for publication, and the book was published in 1974. Other works include The Shining (1977), The Dead Zone (1979) and Pet Cemetery (1983), to name but a few. Misery was published in 1987. Many of his works, including Misery, have been adapted for the screen and he has written various screenplays. The popular film Stand by Me was adapted from his story, The Body, and he directed the film Maximum Overdrive. A great lover of films, King has commented that when writing novels he sees them "almost as movies in my head". The film version of Misery, directed by Rob Reiner and starring Kathy Bates and James Caan, won an Oscar in 1991 for Best Leading Actress.
King is probably the most successful living author in terms of sales of his books. He has received many awards for his stories including the prestigious O Henry prize for a short story. Whilst popular horror writing might be seen as inferior to more literary writing, King is clearly a gifted story teller, and his works have received some serious critical attention. He sees himself as a serious and 'honest craftsman', has taught creative writing courses in his old university, and has written on the art of writing horror stories in Danse Macabre.
"I and my fellow horror writers are absorbing and diffusing all your fears and anxieties and insecurities and taking them upon ourselves. We're sitting in the darkness beyond the flickering warmth of your fire, cackling into our cauldrons and spinning out our spider webs of worlds, all the time sucking the sickness from your minds and spinning it out into the night."
