Content Warning: This section includes discussions of addiction and animal abuse.

Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947, to a working-class New England household. King’s father, a World War II veteran and a traveling vacuum salesman, had an alcohol addiction and left the family when King was two years old, leaving his mother to raise him and his brother alone. Despite this, King’s father had an outsized impact on the author’s career; as a child, King came across a box of his father’s old paperbacks in the attic and realized that he wanted to be a writer.

Despite resenting his father’s absence and addiction, King drank heavily throughout his youth, a habit that worsened in college. He began using drugs when his career took off, and he was introduced to cocaine at one of the first Hollywood parties he attended. He began writing about cocaine during the late 1970s and mid-1980s, and today, post-recovery, he often cites the drug as the reason for the volume and incoherence of much of his work in the period. He famously wrote The Running Man over the course of one week, and in his 2000 memoir On Writing, he notes that he barely remembers writing his 1981 novel Cujo.