Although Carrie was King's sixth novel, it was his first to be published in 1973.

A month before his college graduation, after drinking heavily in a local bar, King was arrested for stealing traffic cones.

After his dad left the family when King was only two, his mom raised Stephen and his older brother David. She supported them working many jobs and often left them in the care of various relatives.

In June 1970, King graduated from the University of Maine with a Bachelor of Science degree in English and a certificate to teach high school.

In his early days of writing, King would rattle away so furiously on his second-hand typewriter that the letter M eventually broke off and he had to write in the missing letters by hand.

After King's original pseudonym (Gus Pillsbury--his maternal grandfather's name) was outed, he had to change it "on the spot". King became Richard Bachman--Richard as a tribute to crime author Donald E Westlake's pseudonym Richard Stark and Bachman for Bachman-Turner Overdrive, the band King was listening to at the time his publisher asked him to choose his pseudonym.

Prior to his "death" by "cancer of the pseudonym" in 1985, Bachman published five novels. Two further novels were "discovered" and published "posthumously" for a total of seven novels. King's novels written as Richard Bachman are Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man, Thinner, The Regulators and Blaze.

Published in 1977, Rage features Charlie Decker, "a disturbed high-school student with authority problems" that kills one of his teachers and takes the rest of his class hostage. Since the plot resembles actual events that have transpired since it's publication, King no longer wanted it to be in print for fear that it might inspire similar occurrences.

When The Stand was originally published in 1978, Doubleday warned King that the book's size would make it too expensive for the market to bear. As a result, he cut about 400 pages (around 150,000 words) from the original manuscript. In 1990, an unabridged edition was published, billed as The Complete and Uncut Edition, this became the longest book published by King at 1,152 pages.

In The Stand, an extremely contagious and lethal strain of influenza is developed as a biological weapon. This virus, dubbed the "superflu" and "Captain Trips" by journalists, triggers a global pandemic of apocalyptic proportions. In March 2020, King reassured his followers on Twitter "No, coronavirus is NOT like THE STAND. It's not anywhere near as serious. It's eminently survivable. Keep calm and take all reasonable precautions."