"If you have an imagination, let it run free." - Steven
King, 1963
Stephen Edwin King is one of today's most popular and best
selling writers. King combines the elements of
psychological thrillers, science fiction, the paranormal,
and detective themes into his stories. In addition to these
themes, King sticks to using great and vivid detail that is
set in a realistic everyday place.
Stephen King who is mainly known for his novels, has
broadened his horizons to different types of writings such
as movie scripts, nonfiction, autobiographies, children's
books, and short stories. While Stephen King might be best
known for his novels "The Stand and It", some of his best
work that has been published are his short stories such as
"The Body" and "Quitters Inc". King's works are so powerful
because he uses his experience and observations from his
everyday life and places them into his unique stories.
Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine, on
September 21, 1947, at the Maine General Hospital. Stephen,
his mother Nellie, and his adopted brother David were left
to fend for themselves when Stephen's father Donald, a
Merchant Marine captain, left one day, to go to the store
to buy a pack of cigarettes, and never returned. His
father's leaving had a big indirect impact on King's life.
In the autobiographical work, "Danse Macabre", Stephen King
recalls how his family life was altered: "After my father
took off, my mother, struggled, and then landed on her
feet." My brother and I didn't see a great deal of her over
the next nine years. She worked a succession of continuous
low paying jobs."
Stephen's first outlooks on life were influenced by his
older brother and what he figured out on his own while his
family moved around the North Eastern and Central United
States. When he was seven years old, they moved to
Stratford, Connecticut. Here is where King got his first
exposure to horror. One evening he listened to the radio
adaptation of Ray Bradbury's story "Mars Is Heaven!" That
night King recalls, he "slept in the doorway, where the
real and rational light of the bathroom bulb could shine on
my face" (Beaham 16). Stephen King's exposure to oral
storytelling on the radio had a large impact on his later
writings. King tells his stories in visual terms so that
the reader would be able to "see" what was happening in
his/her own mind, similar to the way it was done on the
radio (Beaham 17).
King's fascination with horror, early on continued and was
pushed along only a couple weeks after Bradbury's story.
One day, little Stephen was looking through his mother's
While many people in America learn through the standard schooling system there are some that come into an education on their own, in their own way. Here I am going to compare the similarities and differences between the ways that Mike Rose, an award winning writer and professor in the School of Education at UCLA and Malcolm X, an African American activist who was a renowned speaker and ideologist, were motivated to start taking their education seriously, and how they went about getting that education.
He used rhetorical techniques such as allusion, irony and metaphors. These were all ways of connecting to his reasoning’s by using an element of life or something that we are well aware of. He also used different types of appeals, which were pathos, logos and ethos. Each of these appeals had drawn us into his reading in different ways to connect to our emotions and the most affective was the common logic he brought and his credibility of being a well-experienced person in horror. Common logic is the best way to catch your readers attention because if they understand what you are proclaiming then they can grasp onto your argument. For Why We Crave Horror Movies, King gave both visible common logic and hidden. The hidden had to do with the psychological reasons to why we desire horror movies and how it can release our hidden, evil emotions that we normally keep inside of us. Also, it relieves us of stress to not be in the real world even if it is just for an hour or more. These hidden logic is more of a realization for the readers and come into sense these are the reasons why we truly do crave horror
King chooses to compare the minds of a child and an adult to see the different resilience levels when exposed to the horror genre. He describes his findings as a paradox, “Children, who are physically quite weak, lift the weight of unbelief with ease” (PP 118). King assumes because the mind of an adult is mature it can handle the horrific depictions within the horror variety yet children seem too be able to withstand the pressure. King backed his theory by analyzing Walt Disney’s movies and their impact on a child’s imagination. Walt Disney’s movie Bambi is what Stephen King pinpointed when comparing the toll of horrific events in children and adult minds. King questioned adults about what was most terrifying about a movie when they were younger and they stated, “Bambi’s father shot by the hunter, or Bambi and his mother running before the forest fire” (PP 119). Another aspect King unveiled was the Doppler Effect and that, “A part of ‘growing up’ is the fact that everything has a scare potential for the child under eight” (PP 119). The cognitive imagination does not stop developing it just suppresses certain mental functions to draw a line between what is real and what is not. Horror novelist mask the tension with comedy yet with one swift motion it, “Knocks the adult props out from under us and tumbles us back down the slide into childhood” (PP
Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his parents separated when Stephen was a toddler, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of the elderly couple. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is an autobiography written by Frederick Douglass himself. No one knows the hardships and difficult times that Frederick Douglass went through as a slave, better than himself. That is why Frederick Douglass is considered to be, in my opinion, is the most reliable author when it comes to telling the story of his life as a slave.
Stephen King’s, “Popsy” and “Graveyard Shift” are two short stories that bring the real-world fears into contact with fictional or imaginary fears. Stephen King, born in 1947 in Portland, Maine, has become one of the most famous and notorious horror story writers of the past century. “Popsy” was written in 1993 as part of Mr. King’s short story collection “Nightmares & Dreamscapes”. This short story can be impactful to people through a sense of fear and justice to those who do wrong. “Graveyard Shift” was written in 1970 and was first published in Caviler Magazine but was later added to King’s short story collection “Night Shift” in 1978. The relevance of this story to society, is through a sense cruel and morbid poetic justice. Both “Popsy”
Spignesi, Stephen J. The Essential Stephen King : A Ranking Of The Greatest Novels, Short
What many people don’t know about King is his how he was as a person, not a writer. People may think that he is a very violent and mysterious person, but Stephen King is not like that at all, said an ex-student of Kings. Arthur Norton said in an interview with King, “There is this genial childlike quality about King… He is an average guy.” King says in the same interview, “I am a very credulous person. I will believe what I am told.”
Malcolm X was an African American minister and civil rights leader. Unlike many activists of his time, he took a different approach on the movement. In his lifetime, from 1925 to 1965, he was known as an advocate for the rights of blacks, and has been named one of the greatest and most influential men in history.
For such a successful writer, Stephen King really had no secret to his writing style. King has credited free writing for his best ideas. He also has a very down to earth way of looking at his fame. Stephen King would read for four hours, and then he would write for four hours or until he reached 2,000 words. In a Time magazine interview, King called this his nine to five approach and that he, “worked until beer o’ clock.” When asked where his ideas came from, King would often reply, “I have the heart of a small boy. . . And I keep it in a jar on my desk.” Also, he does not have just one particular way of writing horror, and what often sets off the terror in his readers most was the vast amount of detail portrayed.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When most Americans hear that name the first thing that comes to mind is his “Dream”. But that is not all he was. His life was more than a fight against segregation, it was segregation. He lived it and overcame it to not only better himself but to prove it could be done and to better his fellow man.
evidence of Stephen King being very interest in horror showed in his work in his early
Stephen Edwin King was the son of Donald King and Ruth Pillsbury-King. He was born on September 21st, 1947 in the town of Portland, Maine. Stephen’s dad, Donald, abandoned the family when Stephen was very young. Stephen grew up with his hard working mother and his older brother, David. Stephen and his family moved around a lot throughout his childhood, but they finally settled in Durham, Maine when Stephen was eleven. Stephen was a student at Durham Grammar School, and he continued his schooling at Lisbon Falls High School and graduated in 1966.Throughout Stephen’s years in school he was an introverted child. He read many comic books and fantasy-horror fiction novels, and he loved to watch science fiction and monster movies in his free time. Stephen wrote many short stories while he was in high school, and he even won an essay contest. Aside from his schooling, Stephen was played on his high school’s football team and he was in a band called the MoonSpinners. After high school, Stephen went to the University of Maine to major in English. While in college, Stephen took many writing classes and continued writing his stories. He also wrote a column in the University’s newspaper. He tried to make money off of his writings, but since he got a small amount of income for his short stories he had to work other odd jobs as well. He graduated from the university with a B.A. in English in 1970. After graduating from university, Stephen married Tabitha Spruce whom he later had three children with, and he began teaching at Hampden Academy. In 1973 Stephen’s first novel, Carrie, was published, so Stephen quit his teaching job to become a full time author. Stephen has published many works since 1973.
King owes his success to his ability to take what he says are “real fears” (The Stephen King Story, 47) and turn them into a horror story. When he says “real fears” they are things we have all thought of such as a monster under the bed or even a child kidnapping and he is making them a reality in his story. King looks at “horror fiction...as a metaphor” (46) for everything that goes wrong in our lives. His mind and writing seems to dwell in the depths of the American people’s fears and nightmares and this is what causes his writing to reach so many people and cause the terror he writes about to be instilled in his reader.
For additional help in understanding his reasoning and thought processes, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson, can give one a sense of exactly why King had such a strong religious background. In fact, the first words of the writing state “Of course I was religious. I grew up in the church. My father was a preacher, my grandfather was a preacher, my great-grandfather was a preacher, my only brother is a preacher, my daddy’s brother is a preacher. So of course I didn’t have much choice” (Carson 1). Furthermore, this work is special because it combines hundreds of King’s writings in order to make a first person narrative of his life. The book skips no part of his life and includes his thoughts and feelings