Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947, to Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. According to Lisa Rogak's 2009 biography, Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King, baby Stephen's birth came as a surprise. Years earlier, Ruth King was diagnosed as infertile, which had led the Kings to adopt Stephen's older brother, David Victor, in 1945.

In the early years of their marriage, Ruth and Donald King were constantly on the move. Donald, a merchant marine, was frequently away from home. As Stephen King writes in his 1981 nonfiction book Danse Macabre, his father was a fan of horror and science fiction stories and had himself unsuccessfully tried his hand at writing. The discovery of a box of his father's books, which included a volume by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, would prove a revelatory moment for King.

With the end of the World War II, Donald King returned home on a more or less permanent basis and took a job as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. Although Stephen King has virtually no memories of his father, he has described him as "a man with an itchy foot." "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," King says. When the author was only two years old, his father left to get a pack of cigarettes and never returned.     

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qL7Up56eZpOkunB%2BlWlscWtfqbWmedOrmKChk2K%2Fpq3LZqOinpViwLW70bJkqJ5dqMGmvMeepWajmaO0cA%3D%3D