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There were, almost from the start, two Kings. Mr. Outside grew up in Durham, Me., where his mother had moved to care for her aging parents. He was oversized and ungainly, with a thatch of unruly black hair, buck teeth and thick glasses, the one who was predictably chosen last in sandlot games. Mr. Inside was the fatherless boy who held a lot of "anger that has never been directed. In my inward life, I still boil a lot." So it is no surprise that many of King's books could be fairly called "The Revenge of the Nerds": the ursine kid with the bad eyes and the shambling gait would find a way to get his own back, even if it took him 20 years -- especially if it took him 20 years.
Vengeance was novels away when Stephen scraped through the University of Maine at Orono, moonlighting as a dishwasher, Little League coach and gas- station attendant. He majored in English, minored in dramatics, marched for peace, voted Republican for the last time in 1968 ("I believed Nixon when he said he'd get us out of Viet Nam"), and met his future wife, a woman whose unlikely name, Tabitha Spruce, seems to have been plucked from a Stephen King coven. She remembers him as an imposing figure, a "campus institution" who wrote a weekly column called "King's Garbage Truck" for the school newspaper. Recalls Stephen: "Tabby looked like a waitress. She came across -- and still does -- as a tough broad." After graduation they married; when he was unable to find a teaching position, he labored in a launderette for $60 a week. "Budget was not exactly the word for whatever it was we were on," King later wrote. "It was more like a modified version of the Bataan Death March."
In 1971 he finally landed a job as a prep-school English instructor at Hampden, Me. At night Tabitha put on her hot-pink uniform and went to work at Dunkin' Donuts. When she exited, King turned to the typewriter which was perched on a child's desk. As an adolescent, he had read Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man and other works that were adapted for The Twilight Zone. "The same year," he recalls, "I read Peyton Place and Kings Row. I understood instinctively that both authors were talking about the small-town caste society that I grew up in, the veil of hypocrisy, what people hide behind. I understood that I could write about my own milieu and combine it with Matheson's approach, and it worked like a bandit."
So did King. He began to sell short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier and Adam; the checks, he remembers, "always seemed to come just in time to buy antibiotics for the baby's ear infection or to keep the telephone in the apartment for another record-breaking month." One baby later, there was barely enough money for the kids and none at all for the phone. It was disconnected the month King turned in the manuscript of Carrie, a novel about an adolescent with telekinetic powers and a lethal resentment of her high school tormentors. The work was worth a $2,500 advance, more than enough to pay some bills. And a good thing too: on Mother's Day, 1973, a Doubleday editor called about the sale of paperback rights. "I thought he was going to tell me I was only getting $5,000 or something," King fondly remembers. "He said $400,000. The only thing I could think to do was go out and buy my wife a hair dryer. I stumbled across the street to get it and thought I would probably get greased by some car."