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One of the most prolific and popular authors in the world today, Stephen King has become part of pop culture history. His best-selling novels such as Carrie, It, Christine, and many others have captured the imaginations of millions of readers. But who is the man behind those tales of horror, grief, and the supernatural? Where do these ideas come from? And what drives him to keep writing at a breakneck pace after a thirty year career?
In this unauthorized biography, Lisa Rogak reveals the troubled background and lifelong fears that inspire one of the twentieth century's most influential authors. Despite his dark and disturbing work, Stephen King has become revered by critics and his countless fans as an all-American voice more akin to Mark Twain than H. P. Lovecraft. Haunted Heart chronicles his story, revealing the character of a man who has created some of the most memorable---and frightening---stories found in literature today.
- Sales Rank: #970712 in Books
- Brand: Rogak, Lisa
- Published on: 2010-01-05
- Released on: 2010-01-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .74" w x 5.50" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Though critical studies of his vast oeuvre abound, King—the bestselling author of the 20th century—has not been the subject of a book-length biography until this strictly serviceable study. Rogak (The Man Behind The Da Vinci Code) doesn't probe her subject or his work too deeply. Rather, she strings together the best-known facts of his life with workmanlike efficiency: his family's early abandonment by his father; the author's triumph over an impoverished childhood; his perseverance and prolificacy as a writer; his determination, despite his comfort with genre fiction, to be regarded as more than a horror writer; his struggles with alcohol and drugs; his generosity toward other writers; the accident that nearly killed him in 1999. Rogak structures her text primarily around the chronology of King's scores of books and their film adaptations. Though she interviewed some of King's friends and colleagues, much of the book is derived from secondary sources. Her text is repetitive and cliché-ridden, but the facts she marshals will serve King fans not familiar with his life. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Haunted Heart is a thoroughly respectful overview of King's life, and a great starter biography for new fans.” ―The Boston Globe
“The biographer is smart in sticking with the man himself. She looks at what scares King enough that he's been able to keep readers entertained for thirty years.... Rogak does an admirable job pulling together materials from disparate sources into a readable whole.” ―Bangor Daily News
“Rogak… has pieced together King's sometimes erratic life scrupulously into a clean, swift read.” ―Times Online (U.K.)
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
APT PUPIL
By all accounts, Stephen King should never have been born.
His mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury, who went by her middle name, married a captain in the merchant marines named Donald Edwin King on July 23, 1939, in Scarborough, Maine. But given Donald’s frequent and lengthy absences due to the encroaching war, their marriage was on shaky ground from the start.
Doctors had informed Ruth that she would never bear children, and so the Kings did what many presumably infertile couples did back then and applied to adopt a child.
David Victor was adopted shortly after his birth in Portland, Maine, on September 14, 1945, a month after the end of the war.
Despite her doctor’s diagnosis of infertility, in the midwinter of 1947, Ruth discovered she was pregnant. Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, two years to the day after David’s adoption was finalized. He shares the birthday with H. G. Wells, author of such sci-fi classics as The War of the Worlds, who was born eighty-one years earlier.
Nellie Ruth Pillsbury was born on February 3, 1913, in Scarborough, Maine, to Guy Herbert and Nellie Weston Fogg Pillsbury. She was the fourth of eight children.
Ruth’s ancestral roots ran deep in her seaside hometown of Scarborough, Maine. Her great-great-grandfather Jonathan Pillsbury moved to town before 1790 just after the American Revolution ended, married a local woman, and raised a family. Ruth’s ancestors owned property, farmed, and built ships and houses in Scarborough for many generations. The family lived on Prouts Neck, a peninsula a fifteen-minute drive from Portland, whose population was a mix of summer people and locals whose roots went back at least several generations. As a young girl, Ruth was surrounded by her siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Artist Winslow Homer, who died in 1910, had his studio and retirement home near Guy Pillsbury’s home.
In the nineteenth century, Scarborough was an active seaport. In addition to farming, townspeople participated in fishing and shipbuilding. A dike was built in 1877 to control overflowing tidal marshes, but it changed the seascape around Scarborough from a port to a salt marsh.
The town recovered and gained popularity as a summer destination in the early 1900s when regular trolley service brought tourists from Boston and New York. Vacation establishments known as shore dinner houses sprang up along with tourist homes and hotels and motels. A majority of the population worked at jobs in the tourist industry for the summer, including a hotel known as the Pillsbury House, run by some of Ruth’s relatives from 1915 to 1932. In the early 1900s, Ruthie’s father, Guy, supplemented his main income as a carpenter by shuttling tourists from the station to their hotels in a horse-drawn carriage.
Nellie, Ruth’s mother, had worked as a schoolteacher before her marriage, and the entire Pillsbury family placed a high importance on education and music for their children. Ruth’s siblings would go on to attend Bowdoin, Northeastern, and Emerson.
In 1931, the Depression was deeply entrenched in coastal Maine. Natives were already used to making do with what they had, but the Depression brought even less hard cash to down-east households as fewer tourists could afford to travel to the state for vacation. Guy Pillsbury had a houseful: his oldest daughter, Mary, at twenty-three, was still living at home, as were his other children, Mollie, Lois, Mary, Guy Jr., Carolyn, Ethelyn, and Ruth. It was time for some of them to move on. Ruth was only too happy to set off to see the world.
After her idyllic childhood, Ruth studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston for a time. Little is known about her life during the Depression, but clearly she didn’t have an easy time of it when it came to her personal life.
A couple of years after she left Scarborough in 1931, Ruth got married, but the marriage quickly soured and she filed for divorce. In the 1930s, divorce was rare in the United States, and many men would automatically have viewed a divorced woman as damaged goods. A few years later, she met Donald Edwin King, who was born on March 11, 1914, to William R. and Helen A. Bowden King, in Peru, Indiana, and Ruth’s history as a divorced woman didn’t seem to bother him.
Ruth and Donald were married on July 23, 1939, in Scarborough, Maine, with her family present. Shortly after the wedding, the couple moved to Chicago to live with Donald’s family at 4815 Belle Plaine Avenue. The honeymoon quickly wore off as Ruth found herself homesick for her native Maine. She was frequently alone while Donald continued to travel around the world as a merchant marine.
Over the next six years, the couple moved frequently. After spending a couple of years in Chicago, they moved to 17 Terrace Place in Croton-on-Hudson, just north of New York City. But again, Don took off, leaving Ruth to fend for herself for a few years while her husband visited sporadically.
She put a brave face on things and decided to pursue a musical career. Every Sunday morning, she ferried herself to Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center to play the organ on a radio show called The Church Today on the NBC network, a weekly broadcast of a traditional church service. If Donald objected to his wife’s career, it didn’t stop her. After all, Ruth was a headstrong woman. Besides, he wasn’t around enough to be bothered by it.
When it was clear that World War Two would soon end, the Kings returned to Maine and Donald retired from his footloose life. The couple fell into an uneasy truce in their modest home in Scarborough, Maine, an hour’s drive from Ruth’s relatives in Durham. Ruth had never learned to drive a car and depended on her husband to get around. He didn’t care for her family, so visits were infrequent. The couple’s unhappiness grew.
Donald took a job as a door-to-door salesman around Portland, pushing Electrolux vacuum cleaners to housewives who were establishing families and contented households as they settled into the beginnings of the postwar baby boom. Knowing that he’d spend each night in the same house, with the same woman, did nothing to soothe the restlessness Donald had indulged during the years he roamed all over the world, during stints at sea that lasted for months at a time. “As my mother once told me, he was the only man on the sales force who regularly demonstrated vacuum cleaners to pretty young widows at two o’clock in the morning,” said Steve years later. “He was quite a ladies’ man, according to my mother. In any case, he was a man with an itchy foot, a travelin’ man, as the song says. I think trouble came easy to him.”
Neither an adopted nor a biological child could keep Donald with his family. He was stuck in a place he didn’t like with a family he didn’t particularly want. And the housewives who invited him into their homes for more than his vacuum cleaners couldn’t hold him either. He missed the adventure of the open road and sea, and waking up in the morning—or in the middle of the night—and never knowing which enemies he’d face.
So one night, when Steve had just turned two, Donald casually told his wife that he was going to the store for a pack of cigarettes. He walked out the door and kept on going. They never saw him again. The drama of his departure would be comically cliché, if not for the permanent damage it did to every member of the King family.
Ruth was a resourceful Mainer, frugal and practical by nature.
After her husband walked out, Ruth packed up her two kids, swallowed her pride, and depended on her relatives, as well as Don’s family in Chicago, to put them up for a short time each while she looked for a job to keep them afloat. Steady jobs for a once-divorced, once-abandoned female pianist with two small children were not in great abundance, even in the great economic boom of the postwar years, so she took what she could get, which most often was menial labor as a housekeeper or bakery clerk.
The small King family would stay in a room in an aunt’s or cousin’s house or apartment until Ruth felt they were about to wear out their welcome, then they’d move on to the next sympathetic relative with a room to spare. Their perambulations took them far beyond Maine. During the first four years after Donald left and while Stephen was two to six years of age, they lived in Chicago; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Malden, Massachusetts; and West De Pere, Wisconsin.
Sometimes, to Ruth’s great consternation, she had to split up the family. At one point Steve stayed with Ruth’s younger sister Ethelyn and her husband, Oren Flaws, in West Durham, Maine, while Dave stayed with Mollie, another sister, in Malden, Massachusetts.
Ruth King rarely let her boys see her dejection at their poverty and constant moves. Instead, she dealt with their circumstances with a sense of humor and by telling her young sons stories. Both her optimism and storytelling would have a lasting influence on Steve.
The boys often shared a bedroom, more often a bed, and had to deal with threadbare hand-me-down clothes and broken toys from cousins who were often resentful at the attention Steve and David received. In the midst of such tumult, and with a few relatives who were clearly not thrilled about having a couple of youngsters underfoot, the two young boys quickly learned to look after each other, finding a comfortable refuge in books. They often read to each other. When Ruth got home from work, she’d grill them to make sure that they’d been reading the whole time she was gone.
In later years, Steve told a story from when he was four years old and playing outside with a friend who lived near a railroad line. He was supposed to wait to be picked up or to call Ruth when he wanted to come home, but he showed up back home an hour later, clearly in shock, his face white as a sheet.
While they were playing, S...
Most helpful customer reviews
41 of 45 people found the following review helpful.
Some proofing and editing, please.....
By D. D. Montee
Although there's some interesting anecdotal material here (however little that is really new), I was shocked at the clear lack of editing and proofreading in a book published by an established house like St. Martin's. A few examples: "And so, the general shape of Stephen King's life and creative gifts were (sic) cast" (p. 25). "A flurry of movies based on his books followed that fall, including GRAVEYARD SHIFT and IT" (p.132)--the Fall in question is 1984, and IT wasn't published in book form until 1986. But the worst aspect for the reader to wade through is the repetitiveness of the prose: for example, "Steve and Tabby had fallen into a comfortable rhythm of spending half the year in Maine and the other half in Florida" (p. 219); and then, less than 10 pages later: "As 2005 began, Steve and Tabby had fallen into a comfortable rhythm of spending half the year in Maine and the other half in Florida" (p. 226). It's a shame that so little care seems to have been spent by author, editors, or copyreaders on a book about a major author by a reputable publishing house priced at $25.95. Take the money and run, I suppose, and Mr. King (whose work and life deserves a more considered and considerate approach than is evident here) is exploited once again.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Will the real Stephen King please stand up?
By Sam Sattler
In "Haunted Heart," her unauthorized Stephen King biography, Lisa Rogak presents a straightforward look into the major events of King's life, from his birth into an impoverished family to the multi-millionaire lifestyle he lives today. And despite how heavily the book depends on secondary sources, and all the media attention given to King for more than three decades now, even passionate Stephen King followers should come away from it with a better understanding of the man.
Any potential revelations in the book originate in Rogak's speculation about how King's childhood shaped him into the writer, and the man, he is today, not from the well-known facts about his youth and his career. Stephen King does not remember his father, a man who, as the story goes, went down to the corner one evening for a pack of cigarettes and never returned. King's mother never remarried and it was only by working multiple jobs when they came her way, and with substantial help from her sisters, that she was able to keep Steve and his brother together.
The resulting insecurity King felt as a child convinced him that the world is a dangerous place filled with countless scary things wholly deserving his fear. He admits that he fears most of them and that the only way he can escape those fears, even temporarily, is to write about them - something for which his fans should be grateful.
Rogak describes the depth of King's addiction to drugs and alcohol in great detail. However, the surprising thing is not King's alcoholism or past drug use, neither of which is much of a secret these days. Rather, the surprise is how productive King was during even the worst years of his addictions. To put it into perspective, consider that he has no memory of the exhaustive editing process he went through to finalize Cujo or the fact that he was almost constantly drunk or stoned during the entire time he directed his first motion picture but still managed to finish the project.
"Haunted Heart" does well in its chronological presentation of Stephen King's life, and Lisa Rogak's assessment of what made King into the superstar writer that he is today is an interesting, if not new, theory. Readers looking for the basic Stephen King story will not be disappointed but one has to wonder what King's take would be on all the speculation about what makes him tick. Unfortunately, without King's participation or response we will never know how close to the truth Rogak and others have managed to get.
Stephen King fans will appreciate Rogak's efforts but will, at the same time, wish that King had made himself available to her.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
An interesting and readable book
By Bookreporter
My first introduction to Stephen King was SALEM'S LOT, which I read in the mid-1970s while my husband worked nights and our children were fast asleep. At that time, although I had to wake up at 6:00 to get ready for work, the story kept me up reading all night. It both fascinated and frightened me; I was too fascinated to quit turning the pages and too frightened to close my eyes. Since then, I've been a fan of King's and have read most of his novels as well as his memoir of the craft, ON WRITING.
HAUNTED HEART by Lisa Rogak portrays King's life and times in a conversational tone and voice, yet in a thorough and convincing manner. The book includes facts, anecdotes, interviews, quotes, several photos and a timeline. Some of the information here are already known from news stories, magazine articles or other sources. Much of it, however, is new --- at least to me --- and I suspect to others as well.
What sets this unauthorized biography apart is that Stephen King, the man and writer, is examined in the context of his times: a child raised by a single mother during the 1950s; a college student and protestor during the Vietnam era; a young father, husband and struggling writer working menial jobs in the early 1970s; a prolific and highly paid writer beginning in the mid-1970s; a generous benefactor; a loyal Red Sox fan since his childhood; a rehabilitated abuser of alcohol and drugs; a victim of a near-fatal accident at the turn of the century; a devoted husband for nearly four decades; and a proud father and grandfather.
The chapter titles, which are also the names of some of King's works, give clues as to the narrative that follows. For example, Chapter 1, "Apt Pupil," covers King's early childhood and formative years. His terrifying accident and recovery after being hit by a van are discussed in Chapter 12, "Misery."
HAUNTED HEART contains personal information about King that I have never read before, most notably about his wife, Tabitha, and their three children, Naomi, Joe and Owen. While the anecdotes about the loyalty and love of Tabitha and their devotion to their kids complement the biography, I had hoped it would've included photos of them, as well as his mother Ruth and brother Donald. Nevertheless, I found HAUNTED HEART to be an interesting and a readable book. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about Stephen King, the incomparable writer who has created some of the most haunting stories that have fascinated and frightened readers for decades.
--- Reviewed by Donna Volkenannt
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