King graduated from the University of Maine in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in English. While writing short stories, he supported himself by teaching and working as a janitor, among other jobs. His first published novel, Carrie, about a tormented teenage girl gifted with telekinetic powers, appeared in 1974 (films 1976 and 2013) and was an immediate popular success.

Carrie was the first of many novels in which King blended horror, the macabre, fantasy, and science fiction. Among such works are ’Salem’s Lot (1975; TV miniseries 1979 and 2004); The Shining (1977; film 1980; TV miniseries 1997); The Stand (1978; TV miniseries 1994 and 2020–21); The Dead Zone (1979; film 1983; TV series 2002–07); Firestarter (1980; film 1984); Cujo (1981; film 1983); The Running Man (1982; film 1987); Christine (1983; film 1983); Thinner (1984; film 1996); It (1986; TV miniseries 1990; films 2017 and 2019); Misery (1987; film 1990); The Tommyknockers (1987; TV miniseries 1993); The Dark Half (1989; film 1993); Needful Things (1991; film 1993); Dolores Claiborne (1993; film 1995); Dreamcatcher (2001; film 2003); Cell (2006); Lisey’s Story (2006; TV miniseries 2021); Duma Key (2008); Under the Dome (2009; TV series 2013–15); 11/22/63 (2011; TV miniseries 2016); Joyland (2013); Doctor Sleep (2013; film 2019), a sequel to The Shining; Revival (2014); The Outsider (2018; TV miniseries 2020); The Institute (2019); and Later (2021).

King published several early novels, among them the The Running Man, under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. After admitting to being Bachman, King released a collection of the first four Bachman novels, The Bachman Books (1985), under his own name; it also included his essay “Why I Was Bachman.” King later published The Regulators (1996) and Blaze (2007) under Bachman’s name.

King’s Mr. Mercedes (2014), Finders Keepers (2015), and End of Watch (2016) form a trilogy of hard-boiled crime novels centring on retired detective Bill Hodges. King also wrote a serial novel, The Dark Tower, whose first installment, The Gunslinger, appeared in 1982; an eighth volume was published in 2012. A film adaptation of the series was released in 2017.

In his books King explores almost every terror-producing theme imaginable, from vampires, rabid dogs, deranged killers, and a pyromaniac to ghosts, extrasensory perception and telekinesis, biological warfare, and even a malevolent automobile. In his later fiction, exemplified by Dolores Claiborne, King departed from the horror genre to provide sharply detailed psychological portraits of his protagonists, many of them women, who confront difficult and challenging circumstances. Though sometimes disparaged as undisciplined and inelegant, King’s books show him to be a talented storyteller who deploys realistic detail, forceful plotting, and an undoubted ability to involve and scare the reader. His work consistently addresses such themes as the potential for politics and technology to disrupt or even destroy an individual human life. Obsession, the forms it can assume and its power to wreck individuals, families, and whole communities, is a recurring theme in King’s fiction, driving the narratives of Christine, Misery, and Needful Things.

By the early 1990s King’s books had sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, and his name had become synonymous with the genre of horror fiction. His short fiction has been collected in such volumes as Night Shift (1978), Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993), Hearts in Atlantis (1999; film 2001), Just After Sunset (2008), and The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015). The story “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” which was published in Different Seasons (1982), inspired the popular film The Shawshank Redemption (1994).

Numerous other TV and film adaptations have been made of King’s works, and they involved such notable directors as John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, and Rob Reiner. While King often had little participation in these projects, he wrote the TV miniseries The Shining (1997) and Lisey’s Story (2021). He also penned several motion-picture screenplays.

King explored both his own career and the craft of writing in On Writing (2000), a book he completed as he was recovering from severe injuries received after being struck by a car. He has also experimented with different forms of book distribution: The Plant: Zenith Rising was released in 2000 solely as an e-book, distributed via the Internet, with readers asked but not required to pay for it, and the novella UR was made available in 2009 only to users of the Kindle electronic reading device. The short story “Drunken Fireworks” was released in 2015 as an audiobook prior to its print publication.