was born on this date in 1947. The Writer’s Almanac has a lengthy essay on King including this:
After college, King worked jobs at a gas station and a laundromat. His wife worked at Dunkin’ Donuts. He said, “Budget was not exactly the word for whatever it was we were on. It was more like a modified version of the Bataan Death March.” His writing office was the furnace room of his trailer home, and all of his rough drafts were typed single-spaced, with no margins, to save paper.
He sold a series of horror stories to men’s magazines, and he said that the paychecks from these stories always seemed to arrive when one of his kids had an ear infection or the car had broken down.
His first novel was Carrie (1973), about a weird, miserable, high school girl with psychic powers. The hard cover didn’t sell very well, but when his agent called to say that the paperback rights had sold for $400,000, King couldn’t believe it. He said, “The only thing I could think to do was go out and buy my wife a hair dryer. I stumbled across the street to get it and thought I would probably get greased by some car.”
Interestingly enough, science fiction novelist H.G. Wells was also born on this date — in 1866.