Stephen King had a, somewhat, troubled childhood, which, some people believe was the reason he was inspired to write some of his darker works and made him into the writer he is today. Stephen King, one of the most intense storytellers of our time, was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, into a family of three: his mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury, his father, Donald, and his adopted older brother, David. After his parents had separated, when his father left for a pack of cigarettes and never returned, Stephen King and Donald King were cared for by their mother. King and his brother spent parts of their childhood in Fort Wayne, where their father’s family lived, and in Stratford, Connecticut, until Nellie Ruth Pillsbury brought them back to Durham, Maine for good. Twelve-year-old Stephen King developed a love for writing when he wrote articles in his brother’s local newspaper, titled, “Dave’s Rags.” King wrote mainly about upcoming television shows and began to sell the successful articles to people for thirty cents. Young Stephen King even sold them at his school until his teachers put a stop to it. He attended grammar school in Durham, followed by enrolling in the Lisbon Falls High School, where he graduated in 1966. In 1967, when he was twenty, King made his first professional publication, “The Glass Floor,” (King, Tabitha). His earlier works, however, lacked scientific grounding because he had not achieved any college level degree until he studied at The University of Maine at Orono, where he met his future wife, Tabitha. He was active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the wa...
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...es are very unique and his books, “roar forward on all twelve cylinders and doesn’t let up, ”and are recommended if the reader wants an exciting thriller (King, Stephen).
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“Biography of Stephen King.” Horrorking.com. N.p. n.d. Web. 7 Feb 2014.
King, Tabitha. “The Author.” StephenKing.com. 2014. Web. 7 Feb 2014.
Skibinski , Christian. “Biography.” imdb.com. Amazon. 2014. Web. 24 Feb 2014.
Geduld, Marcus. “Should Stephen King Get More Credit As A Writer From Literary Critics?” Forbes.com. Forbes. 8 Feb 2012. Web. 24 Feb 2014.
Nevala-Lee, Alec. “The Uncanny Influence of Stephen King.” Wordpress.com. Wordpress. 20 May 2011. Web. 16 March 2014
King, Stephen. The Ledge. New York City: Doubleday, 1976. Print.
King, Stephen. The Dark Half. New York City: Viking, 1989. Print.
The author was born in Washington D.C. on May 1, 1901. Later, he received a bachelor’s degree from Williams College where he studied traditional literature and explored music like Jazz and the Blues; then had gotten his masters at Harvard. The author is a professor of African American English at Harvard University. The author’s writing
John Cheever’s childhood was riddled with troubles and adversities. He was born in Quincy, Massachusetts on May 27. His father owned a shoe factory, but lost everything in the Great Depression. Cheever’s mother sustained the family through her gift shop. Cheever attended grammar school for seventh and eighth grade and then transferred to Thayer Academy for high school. He was a mediocre student, and was eventually expelled for poor grades. However, Cheever later hinted that this was more likely do to an unnamed rule violation. The experience led Cheever to write his first short story, “Expelled”. Cheever sent “Expelled” into a progressive magazine, where it was noticed by editor Malcolm Cowley. Cheever and Cowley would become close friends and Cowley helped launch Cheever’s writing career. By age eighteen, Cheever had his first short story published in a successful magazine (Bosha).
King, who has explored almost every terror-producing theme imaginable, from vampires, rabid dogs, deranged killers, pyromaniac ghosts, to telekinesis, biological warfare and even a malevolent automobile was known for his horror stories, and strange deaths.
...p; In conclusion, Stephen King is not an easy person to write about. There are thousands of websites and books devoted to him and yet, none mention his international fame. Though my findings were slim, I feel that, given the information available, I have successfully proved that Stephen King has helped bring America into prominence through his writings. King is a dedicated writer and there is no end to his writing in site.
Wright had a large family that all lived close to one another in Jackson, Mississippi, but Wright felt isolated from them because he didn’t have complete faith in the beliefs and values his relatives had. At a young age, Wright’s father left his family, leaving his own family to support themselves with little money. Wright constantly blamed his father for his constant hunger, and “whenever I felt hunger I thought of him with a deep biological bitterness.” (Wright 16). Living on practically nothing, Wright’s mom, Ella began to push her son into becoming the man of the household. Despite Wright’s constant fear of getting hurt, he slowly started to develop bravery. Without being brave, Wright would have never found the courage to write about his own life. The only source of support his family received was from his maternal grandmother, who ...
When writing a story that is meant to scare the reader, authors use a variety of different literary elements to intensify fear. This is apparent in the stories “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “beware: do not read this poem,” and “House Taken Over”. It is shown through transformation in the character, setting, and sometimes even the story or poem itself, adding to the scariness that the reader feels when reading it. While there are some examples of transformation not being scary or not playing a role in stories meant to scare us, transformation plays a crucial role in making the reader of these stories scared.
Stephen Crane was one of America’s most influential nineteenth century writers of realism. He was credited for being a novelist, short-story-writer, poet, and journalist. He was born on November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, as Stephen Townley Crane. Stephen was the youngest sibling of fourteen children (“Stephen Crane Biography”). His writing inspiration came from his family. His mother dedicated her life to social concerns, while his father was a Methodist minister. Two of Crane’s brothers were journalists so it was destined for Stephen Crane to become a writer. His passion came from his parents and the insights from his family life. He attended preparatory school at Claverack College, where he developed a better concept of the Civil War. He attended at Lafayette College and Syracuse University for less than two years. He quit college to become a full-time writer. His first work was Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In his novel, he used firsthand experiences of poverty. The realism in this novel shows his readers what a realistic writer he was to become later (“Stephen Crane”).
Stories have an opportunity to leave the reader with many different impressions. When you look a different characters within the stories the ones that leave the greatest impressions are the ones that tend to scare us. The figures in Bob Dylar’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have you been?”, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”, and Stephen King’s “The Man in the Black Suite” all instill a bit of fear in the reader. They are symbols that represent the devil or devil like attributes in people and the uncertainties of human nature.
America's greatest and most influential authors developed their passion for writing due to cataclysmic events that affected their life immensely. The ardent author Richard Wright shared similar characteristics to the many prominent American authors, and in fact, attained the title of most well-known black author of America. Richard Wright created many important pieces of literature, that would impact America's belief of racial segregation, and further push the boundaries of his controversial beliefs and involvements in several communist clubs. Wright's troubled past begins as a sharecropper while only a child. His childhood remained dark and abandoned.
Stephen King is known as one of the greatest horror and gothic writers of our time. The reason for this is his ability to fuse the gothic elements created by stories such as Dracula or Frankenstein and todays horror. King has written hundreds of short stories but two in-particular “The Night Flier” and “Popsy” show his unique ability to combined gothic elements from the old literature with realistic settings and people of our era. One of his greater talents is being able to use gothic element like vampires and make us see them in a different light. Kings unique way of writing with his old gothic ideals, new horror ideas, and use of realistic settings help to put a new spin on what we conceive as gothic story.
Spadoni, Robert. Uncanny Bodies-The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Film. Berkeley University of California Press, 2007.
According to Freud, "the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. (Freud 220) In other words, the uncanny can be expressed by "the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced" (Freud 244) and "an actual repression of some content thought and a return of this repressed content" (Freud 220). Moreover, he posits the uncanny moment as one in which two ostensibly opposing figures, elements, or definitions appear to coalesce, or in which one is mistaken for the other, revealing the fundamental instability of their distinction. (Alison 32) Besides, it involves the infantile complexes which was formerly repressed but are later revived and gen...
As every well-read person knows, the background in which you grow up plays a huge role in how you write and your opinions. Fuller grew up with a very strict education, learning multiple classic languages before she was eight years old. Fern grew up with writers all throughout her family and had a traditional education and saw first hand the iniquities of what hard-working had to contend with. Through close analysis of their work, a reader can quickly find the connections between their tone, style, content, and purpose and their history of their lives and their educational upbringing.
On September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, a son was born to Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Faulkner. This baby, born into a proud, genteel Southern family, would become a mischievous boy, an indifferent student, and drop out of school; yet “his mother’s faith in him was absolutely unshakable. When so many others easily and confidently pronounced her son a failure, she insisted that he was a genius and that the world would come to recognize that fact” (Zane). And she was right. Her son would become one of the most exalted American writers of the 20th century, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and two Pulitzers during his lifetime. Her son was William Faulkner.
Jack Morgan, The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002) null03, Questia, Web, 29 May 2010.