Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

3 THE GUNSLINGER

The first time Rick Hautala, another freshman English major, saw his new classmate, Steve was standing in the lunch line with his nose buried in a paperback book. “He was reading the kind of junk I liked to read,” said Hautala. “At suppertime he’d be in the line again, but with his nose in a different book. It seemed like he read three books a day since he always seemed to be reading a different book at every meal.”

Though both were English majors, their paths of study were widely divergent. “Steve stuck more with modern poetry and twentieth-century literature, while I focused more on Renaissance and medieval literature,” said Hautala. “His writing stood out from what the majority of students were writing. He wasn’t trying to be pretentious or artsy, he was writing real stories instead of precious little reminiscences.”

“Steve had a very strong point of view,” said classmate Michael Alpert. “He didn’t believe in the official canon—the Harvard curriculum—at all. He thought many of the more popular writers had more to say. He didn’t just talk about subject matter, he talked about language. His sensibility was already formed even back then.”

Jim Bishop had King as a student in freshman English. “He was never without a paperback book, and he talked about authors of popular fiction the other students and professors had never heard of,” said Bishop. “Even then, he saw himself as a famous writer and thought he could make money at it. Steve was religious about writing, and he wrote continuously, diligently. He created his own world.”

In the turmoil of living away from home for the first time and getting accustomed to a whole new slew of classes and a variety of students who were nothing like those back home—i.e., they had money and would occasionally lord it over the others—Steve managed to write his first novel, “The Long Walk,” during his first two semesters of college. He polished it in the summer between his freshman and sophomore year, and then in the fall of 1967, he heard about a first-novel competition run by the noted editor Bennett Cerf at Random House. He sent off a copy of the manuscript, and it came back with a form rejection slip and no scrawled notes from the editor, which he had gotten used to from his submissions to the pulp magazines. He became discouraged and tucked the manuscript away in a drawer.

However, not all was bad news. Steve made his first professional sale to a pulp magazine, Startling Mystery Stories, for a story called “The Glass Floor.” They paid him the princely sum of $35. By his own count, before making the sale, he had received about sixty rejection slips.

He was on his way. Someone besides his mother and his classmates thought his work was good enough to pay real money for it.

Steve had first showed up on campus with a Barry Goldwater bumper sticker on his car, evincing his family’s stalwart Republican roots. Between his sophomore and junior years, Steve discovered that the political beliefs of his youth had been challenged, not only by the Vietnam War, but by the peace movement that was inundating much of the country. He’d gone from the rock-ribbed Republicanism of his youth to a radical form of liberalism that was sweeping across college campuses everywhere, even in a remote corner of Maine.

In August of 1968, Steve decided to head for Chicago to go to the Democratic National Convention to support his preferred candidate, Eugene McCarthy, a senator from Minnesota running against President Lyndon Johnson, who had promised to pull American troops out of Vietnam if elected. At the time, the country was in chaos. Martin Luther King had been killed in April and Robert Kennedy in June, so the stage was set for a contentious convention. With a hundred bucks for spending money, Steve headed for Chicago, staying at YMCAs along the way.

At the convention, word quickly spread that police were taunting the protesters, and vice versa, which resulted in violent clashes between the two groups. Steve was demonstrating outside the convention hall with thousands of other people when tempers suddenly flared and he was maced. He couldn’t see, but he somehow found his way back to the YMCA where he was staying.

In the aftermath of the convention, he became swept up in the political fury and turmoil that was escalating. When he returned to Orono for the start of his junior year in the fall of 1968, it seemed that overnight all the rules had changed. The university was not immune to students demanding radical change in classes and throughout the entire campus. And when it came to the stodgy curriculum of the English Department, Steve was one of the lead instigators.

The University of Maine had the reputation of being an old reliable school where the focus was on mechanical engineering. Any English courses that were offered didn’t stray far from the reliable canon of Dead White Men English literature and composition classes.

Encouraged by the unorthodox demands and requests from some of the undergraduates—Steve included—some of the professors thought it was time for a change as well. Two of Steve’s professors, Burt Hatlen and Jim Bishop, designed a workshop in contemporary poetry that was geared more to graduate students than undergrads. Each workshop met after hours and was limited to twelve students, who had to be approved to attend. They wrote, read, and discussed poetry and literature, and here King was first exposed to the work of Steinbeck and Faulkner.

“Burt was more than a teacher to me, he was a mentor and a father figure,” said Steve. “He made everyone feel welcome in the company of writers and scholars and let us know there was a place for us at the table.”

George MacLeod was one of the students in the workshop. “It was a discussion class held in a living room, which was something completely different than had been offered at the time,” he said. The second thing that stood out about the class was Steve, both his appearance and his contributions to the workshop.

“He was a larger-than-life kind of guy,” said MacLeod, describing how Steve was tall but always seemed to be trying to hide his height by slightly stooping over. It was also hard to miss his long, black, oily hair reaching to his shoulders, his Coke-bottle glasses, and his sloppy manner of dressing. “He sat on the edge of the circle and he’d harrumph and make comments about a poem or what the other students were saying,” MacLeod added. “He always had a different opinion and seldom concurred with the group. He liked to argue with people just to be different.”

Steve was equally contentious with the faculty. One day the faculty invited a few students to offer their input on the future curriculum of the English Department, and it didn’t take long for Steve to offer his two cents. He stood up and immediately criticized the department because of the total absence of popular culture in the courses. He complained that there was no class where he could read a Shirley Jackson novel for credit.

He became known for walking around the campus with a John MacDonald book or a collection of short stories by Robert Bloch. “Some asshole would always ask why was I reading that, and I’d tell them that this man is a great writer,” he said. “But people would see the picture on the front with some lady with her cakes falling out of her blouse, and they would say, ‘It’s garbage.’ So I’d ask, ‘Have you read anything by this guy?’ The inevitable reply would be ‘No, all I gotta do is look at that book, and I know.’ This was my first experience with critics, in this case, my teachers at college.”

He always liked that kind of fiction, he’d grown up with it, and he knew that those were the kind of stories that he wanted to write. Even so, it was a bit of a hard sell to some of his professors.

Even when he was in college, Steve told everyone that his dream was to write popular fiction. “And there he was, spending so much time reading seventeenth-century English literature that he felt was a total waste of time,” said MacLeod. “He definitely had this anti-snob thing going on, and I think that a lot of what motivated him politically was that he was from the wrong side of the tracks.”

Steve shocked the faculty even more when he offered to teach a class about popular fiction, which sent the professors into a tizzy. Many objected not only to including commercial fiction in a college-level course, but also to the idea of an undergraduate teaching it. After the faculty discussed the proposal, they agreed to let Steve teach the course—Popular Literature and Culture—along with Graham Adams, an English professor.

Soon after, MacLeod struck up a friendship with Steve. They both needed to find a new place to live at about the same time, so they looked for an apartment together off-campus with a couple of other students.

They rented a duplex on North Main Street in Orono with each roommate paying forty bucks a month. Downstairs there was a living room and a kitchen, and upstairs were four bedrooms—turned into five when one of them was partitioned with a blanket.

“It was a terrible apartment,” said MacLeod. “In winter, there was ice on the floors. And no one ever used the shower, it was so filthy. Everyone was dirt-poor, but Steve took it in stride since he obviously had grown up that way. He had very low expectations of his environment. We had one roommate who was better off than the rest of us since his parents were paying for his education. He had his own closet and kept his food in it, and the rest of us would filch it on a regular basis.

“But Steve had his own alternative universe in his reading and his books,” MacLeod continued. “He read books like the rest of us breathed. He could tell you how many books John MacDonald had written because he had read all of them. He absorbed every part of a book, and his focus was legendary.”

On virtually every college campus in America in the late sixties, drugs were a fact of life. Whether pot, pills, or acid there was always something around for whoever wanted it, and the apartment on North Main Street was no exception. One day, word spread across campus about a new kind of hallucinatory drug that someone had in a nearby dorm and was willing to share, with one caveat. According to MacLeod, the substance messed with your equilibrium, so he cautioned that anyone who took it should make plans to stay put for a while. “You had to sit on the couch and just wait for it to pass,” he said. Steve took some along with other students, and soon everyone became lost in the experience, talking, listening to music, and laughing.

After a while, someone asked where Steve had gone. They looked around the house, but no one could find him. MacLeod suggested that he had wandered off somewhere on campus and that maybe he was so stoned he couldn’t find his way home. Despite that the effects of the drug were not favorable for conducting a manhunt, his roommates organized a search and began to comb the campus.

They searched the bars, the alleys off Main Street, some of the dorms, and the English Department. After several hours, they gave up and returned to the apartment, where they found Steve in the living room reading a book. “He was sitting in a three-legged easy chair with his feet up on a cranking kerosene heater, which was in the process of melting his rubber boots, and he was oblivious to it all,” said MacLeod. “I think he was reading Psycho. On this particular drug, no one else could even manage to turn the pages, but Steve was sitting there reading, totally safe in his own little cocoon of fiction.”

Later on, Steve would detail his drug consumption during his college years. “I did a lot of LSD and peyote and mescaline, more than sixty trips in all,” he said. “I’d never proselytize for acid or any other hallucinogen, because there are good-trip personalities and bad-trip personalities, and the latter category of people can be seriously damaged emotionally.”

No matter what kind of drug the guys at the apartment took, if the munchies arose, they were a short stumble from Pat’s Pizza and the Shamrock, two of the regular hangouts for students in Orono. Pat’s offered pizza and food cheap enough to fill a poor college student’s belly, while the Shamrock just sold beer, which Steve often referred to as poor man’s Valium.

“The Shamrock was just tables and beer,” said MacLeod. “It was in a basement with no windows, and no light, just three beer taps and the football players who worked them.”

One day between drugs and visits to Pat’s and the Shamrock, Steve called MacLeod into his room, where he pulled open a dresser drawer and revealed hundreds of pulp magazines stashed away in his bureau. It was all the stuff he had read when he was a kid. He pulled out the copy of Startling Mystery Stories with his story in it and told MacLeod that he planned to go to the next level. MacLeod, who also wanted to be a writer, was particularly fascinated by the other magazines, which he recognized as being at least a couple of decades old. Steve’s enthusiasm for writing and pop fiction would in turn fire George up, and they’d often head to the journalism office since neither one owned his own typewriter; Steve had left his at home.

“We’d head over late at night and sit there and bang on these big manuals, and soon it became a routine,” said MacLeod. Sometimes, instead of working on his own stories, he’d watch Steve. “When he sat down at a typewriter, he would just go. He was so incredibly focused that if you hit him with a brick, he wouldn’t notice.”

That same focus and confidence extended to Steve’s work in the classroom. Even back then, he believed in his work. Whenever a professor or student criticized his work for being too modern, he took it in stride.

“This is me and this is who I am,” he’d respond. And if it bothered him, he’d write an essay or crank out an article for the school paper, the Maine Campus.

Between Steve’s classwork, reading and writing, and social life, more than a few of his classmates wondered when the guy slept.

And he still watched as many movies as he did when he was a kid. He had just entered his junior year in college when Night of the Living Dead came out, and one afternoon he went to see it. Kids filled most of the seats, and Steve would later say it was the first time in his life when he sat in a theater full of kids where they were so quiet it was as if they weren’t there. “They were simply stunned by the gore and violence,” he said. “It was the best argument for the rating system that I have ever seen. I don’t have anything against either of the Dead movies or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it’s not something you just hand to kids. You have to be old enough to take it, and these kids just weren’t prepared for it.”

He vowed when he had kids, he’d do it differently. Even though he had cut his teeth on horror movies, the movies of ten years ago were totally different from Night of the Living Dead. He felt that the film left little to the imagination, and that it was better if you had to imagine some things on your own. He followed the same philosophy in his own writing.

He was also starting to crystallize other ideas about what writing should and shouldn’t do for the reader. “Literature is supposed to be a sweaty, close-up thing,” he said. “I want it to reach out and grab you and pull you into a sweaty embrace so you can’t let go. I’ve always strived to hurt the reader but exhilarate him at the same time. I think a book should be something that’s really alive and really dangerous in a lot of ways.”

He was becoming a keen study of human character. And he wasn’t afraid to ask people why they did certain things because he hoped he’d eventually be able to use it in his fiction.

One day, he ran into a girl he’d known in high school, and she had a bruise under her eye. He asked her what happened, but she refused to talk about it. He pressed the matter, asking her to join him for some coffee.

“She told me she’d been out with a guy, and he wanted to do some stuff that she didn’t want to do, and he punched her,” Steve said. He was fascinated and revolted at the same time, so he grilled her gently.

“I can remember saying to her that it takes courage to go out with a guy,” he remembered. “Maybe you’re attracted to him, but basically you’re saying, ‘I’m going to get into your car, I’m going to go somewhere, and I’m going to trust you to bring me back in one piece.’ It takes courage, doesn’t it? And she said, ‘You’ll never know.’

“I never forgot that. It became the basis for a number of different stories I’ve written.”

After writing a few articles and essays for the Maine Campus, Steve decided to approach the editor, David Bright, about writing a weekly column. Bright gave him the go-ahead, and his first column appeared on February 20, 1969. Steve christened his column “The Garbage Truck” because, as he put it, “You never know what you’re going to find in a garbage truck.”

From the beginning, Bright liked Steve’s writing, but he wasn’t overly fond of the nerve-racking style in which Steve cranked out his columns. An hour before the deadline with no column in sight, Steve would show up at the paper’s office. Bright, wringing his hands, would tell Steve how many column inches he needed to fill for that issue. Steve would then sit down at one of the big, hulking green typewriters in the newspaper office and bang out his copy, letter-perfect with no cross-outs, no corrections, no crumpled-up pieces of paper, and meet his deadline with moments to spare.

His subject matter ran the gamut, and he clearly used the column to see how the population at large regarded his view of the world. In his column dated December 18, 1969, he wrote, “It just may be that there is a hole in our world, perhaps in the very fabric of our Universe, and Things cross back and forth. It may be that in some other world all of our ancient boogey men exist and walk and talk—and occasionally disappear into our own realm.”

Indeed, in that same column he mentioned the story of a whole Vermont village called Jeremiah’s Lot that had seemingly vanished into thin air in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and he described a theory by Shirley Jackson, one of his favorite authors, that houses and buildings can be inherently evil. A few columns later, he offered profuse kudos to the university’s activity guild for scheduling a bumper crop of horror movies that semester. Rosemary’s Baby, Psycho, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were all featured films, among others. He didn’t say whether the majority of students shared his glee at the slate of movies.

It’s evident he didn’t much care about what other students and faculty thought of his column; he viewed it as a pebble in the shoe of people on campus, and his aim was to get them thinking, no matter how much they disagreed with his ideas.

Another possibility is that he used it as a screening device so he could find out who his true friends were. That certainly seemed to be the case with his November 13 column, where he first admitted to liking the cops, then said that in contrast he didn’t much care for leftists and liberals. In the tinderbox of the sixties college campus, no matter where you were in the country at the time, this was akin to throwing a jug of kerosene on an already blazing fire.

He then chastised fellow students who supported Huey Newton, a Black Panther who shot and killed a policeman in 1967.

“Cops are the people who stand between you and chaos of an insane society,” he wrote. “In my book, the guy who goes around calling cops pigs is a pig himself, with a filthy mouth and a vapid mind.”

He also took a surprising viewpoint toward sex and birth control. “Birth control demeans the act of sex,” he wrote. “It’s like jumping into your car, starting it up, and driving like hell in neutral. Birth control is a little gutless. It doesn’t seem right to laugh them away with a little round plastic case. Abortion is the only really moral way it can be done. If nothing else, it would force the person involved to come to a serious decision about birth control.”

But he didn’t always write his column to stir up the bee’s nest or test out his supernatural views of the world. Occasionally, Steve would present a laundry list of his favorite songs and albums and movies. In late 1969, he devoted an entire column to naming what he thought were the best albums of the year—Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and Abbey Road from the Beatles—and songs: “The Boxer” from Simon and Garfunkel, and surprisingly, “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies. He detested anything by Blood, Sweat, and Tears or Glen Campbell.

He also contributed short fiction to the college literary magazines, such as Onan and Moth. “The stories that he published in the student magazines had some power to them,” Rick Hautala remembered. “You couldn’t ignore them, but, at the same time there was a little voice that said, ‘Wow, these are really violent. Is this guy sick in the head? Why do the stories have to be so bloody and gory?’ ” Hautala added that Steve’s stories stood out so much from the others it was almost as if they were typed in a different typeface and color.

Because of his “Garbage Truck” column, Steve was pretty well-known on campus, and even the top brass at the university were keeping track of him. President Winthrop Libby even spoke with Professor Ted Holmes about Steve’s prospects for making his living as a writer. “Ted was not especially complimentary on that point,” said Libby. “He said that while Steve certainly had a knack for storytelling, he wished that Steve would write more than horror stories.”

Some of the students were after Steve to expand his platform from the paper to live performances. He played guitar and sang just as well as he played sports in high school, but he relished the chance to get onstage.

An off-campus place called the Coffee House attracted the beatnik crowd. People would get onstage and read poetry—their own or someone else’s—and metaphysical fiction. Steve was invited to read one night, and he chose a story he had written about a guy who had eyes all over his hands, and the audience offered up polite applause. The next time he was asked back was for the Halloween performance, where he read a few more of his horror stories. When the audience started to laugh at certain parts, Steve was dismayed and thought something was wrong with his stories, but most likely the audience laughed from discomfort and anxiety and because the stories were so different from what the others read aloud.

After that, Steve didn’t go back to the Coffee House and opted instead to attend the open mike at the Ram’s Horn, a coffeehouse on campus. But instead of reading stories, Steve brought his guitar and accompanied his singing. “Steve would always sing country-and-western songs about this terrible loser who never had any luck,” said Diane McPherson, a classmate who participated in one of Burt Hatlen’s poetry workshops with King. “I remember thinking at the time that Steve was singing about a version of himself that rang true.”

Due to his weekly soapbox in the college paper, other students were starting to view Steve as not just a columnist but as a leader on campus.

“He was a loose cannon as far as politics go,” said MacLeod. “He was a noisy radical opposed to Vietnam, but at the same time, he was an odd person: on one hand very private and yet public in a loud way.”

“When the antiwar stuff came along, Steve just jumped in and was a leader,” said Rick Hautala. “Whenever we had a student strike, he never seemed to have any qualms about grabbing the microphone and expressing himself.”

There was a military draft at the time, to which many college students were vehemently opposed even though they were protected from conscription, albeit temporarily, since undergraduates and graduate students automatically earned deferments. However, academic achievement was part of the deal: the Selective Service spread the word that they would not hesitate to draft a college student who was carrying less than a B average.

When college deferments ended in 1969, the protests that had been happening on college campuses across the country since the midsixties immediately escalated. Poor physical condition or any untreatable disability such as myopia or flat feet would get a man classified as 4-F—prime condition was awarded a 1-A—and automatically exempt a candidate from service.

Later on, around 1971, a lottery was instituted to make the draft fairer across the board, according to birthday. Birth dates were randomly pulled and assigned a number in order from 1 to 365. The lower the number, the greater the chances of getting drafted.

While some students shied away from participating in campus protests in the hopes that if they kept their heads down and maintained a good grade point average, they wouldn’t be noticed and perhaps earmarked for the draft, others such as Steve didn’t care and didn’t hesitate when it came to riling up the others. He may already have had an idea that he was 4-F and exempt from the draft due to his poor eyesight, which may have been why he felt freer to be outrageous and fling himself out there.

In addition to his column, he posed for a cover for the Maine Campus that appeared on the issue dated January 17, 1970, holding a double-barreled shotgun, with long, wild hair and a wild gleam in his eye that earned him a comparison by more than a few students to Charles Manson, with the caption Study, Dammit!!

In his junior year, Steve was elected to the Student Senate with the largest vote ever in the history of the student elections. One of the responsibilities of the position was to regularly attend meetings of the student affairs committees. President Libby respected Steve’s drive and sense of fairness when it came to dealing with faculty and students and sympathized with some of the tensions that simmered between them, but he picked up on Steve’s true colors early on. “He was essentially a very gentle person who acted the part of a very wild man,” said Libby.

It wasn’t a surprise that academics took a backseat to all of the other things that were happening on campus, and in the world, in the late sixties. Indeed, many students had trouble keeping their minds on their studies. And with all of his various activities, in school and outside of school, Steve didn’t necessarily strike his friends as a particularly stellar student. “We never really talked about it that much,” said MacLeod. “We all studied, but it was very much in the background. Everything was politics and poetry and recreational drugs, and rock and roll.”

With students in larger cities and more well-known colleges all over the country closing down campuses and going on strike, Steve used his position as the head of the student/faculty coalition to make demands of the faculty and administration that would essentially reorganize the university. One night, he organized a march on the president’s house to make a slew of demands that various groups on campus had requested, ranging from more independent studies, bail options, and even free degrees for everybody with a minimum of academic work. He even entertained suggestions from the Students for a Democratic Society, one of the more radical student groups across the country, who wanted several issues admitted to the package Steve would present to Libby.

On a cold, damp spring evening in 1969, Steve led the march across campus brandishing a torch and wearing a wet, ratty, full-length beaver coat followed by a ragtag group of protesters. Counterprotesters chanted slogans and threw eggs and rotten vegetables at students who were marching.

In the end, Libby listened to the demands and promised to meet with Steve and other students to hammer out a compromise, but the protest soon became less important to Steve as he turned his attention to two things that felt much more pressing: his senior year, and Tabitha Spruce.

Steve King and Tabitha Jane Spruce first met at Jim Bishop’s writing seminar, though they both also worked part-time in the Fogler Library. “I thought she was the best writer in that seminar, including myself, because she knew exactly what she was up to,” he said. “She understood syntax and the various building blocks of fiction and poetry in a way that the others didn’t. They wanted to go off into metaphysical frenzies about how they were freeing the voice in their soul and a lot of bullshit like that.”

She had been aware of him since she arrived on campus as a freshman in the fall of 1967. Before he started writing his column, he’d written a letter to the editor of the Maine Campus and the paper had printed it. She’d read it and thought, boy, this guy can write. “But at the same time, I was mad that he got a letter into the paper before I did,” she said.

“He was that rare thing, a Big Man on Campus who was not an athlete,” said Tabby. “He really was literally the poorest college student I ever met in my life. He wore cutoff gum rubbers because he couldn’t afford shoes. It was just incredible that anybody was going to school under those circumstances, and even more incredible that he didn’t care.

“Right from the beginning, I thought he was as good as any published writer I knew. I think it impressed him that I appreciated what he did. He also was hot for my boobs.”

“Tabby looked like a waitress,” he concurred. “She came across, and still does, as a tough broad.”

George MacLeod provides a little background: “When Steve and Tabby met, she was already involved with another student in the workshop, but he dumped her and she was alone when she met Steve. Some of us got the impression that Steve felt sorry for her, but they really clicked; it was two loners and two writers who really understood each other who hooked up.”

Before long, they began to spend all of their free time together. Within a few months, she moved into a small apartment in Orono with him.

Tabitha Jane Spruce was born on March 24, 1949, to Raymond George Spruce and Sarah Jane White in Old Town, Maine, just up the road from Orono. Tabby, as she would be called, was the third of eight children in a Catholic family and attended Catholic grammar school and John Bapst Memorial High School. Her father worked at the family’s general store, R. J. Spruce & Sons, on Main Road in Milford, a stone’s throw across the Penobscot River from Old Town. Tabby’s grandfather Joseph Spruce had purchased the store with his older brother sometime in the early 1900s.

The Spruces were French-Canadian and had changed their name from Pinette in the late 1800s because French Canadians were an easy target for discrimination at the time. The Ku Klux Klan was then active in northern New England and recent immigrants from Quebec—one derogatory term that was often flung at them was Frog—were regularly refused work in the local mills.

All the Spruce kids worked at the store. “I grew up listening to people talk over potbellied stoves,” Tabby said. “I used to cut chunks of chewing tobacco for old guys. My dad cut beef in the back room of the store. At one point my grandmother ran the post office from part of the store.”

Tabby grew up a self-described loner, introspective and independent, and she loved to write: she kept a diary and wrote letters to friends. Like Steve, she was an inveterate reader. “Once I discovered the public library, I was rarely at home,” she said. “One time, the librarian called home to say that I’d been reading adult books, and my mother told her if I understood them, it was okay, and if I didn’t, they couldn’t harm me.”

Also like Steve, Tabby wouldn’t care if she never saw another lobster in her life. As a teenager, she worked at a tourist seafood restaurant near Bangor called Lobsterland and often ran the lobster press, where all of the lobster left over from customers’ plates was gathered and dumped so it could appear on new plates the next day as lobster salad or lobster roll. She grew to detest the way the stale seafood smell permeated her skin, hair, and clothes, but it was the only work open to her at the time.

“When I grew up in Old Town, there wasn’t any women’s movement,” said Tabby. “I learned real early that whatever I did, the basic problem was I was female, and being a female who wore glasses was a real downer. Then I grew boobs and that didn’t get me anywhere either.” She graduated from John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor in June of 1967. After graduation, she proceeded to the University of Maine, the typical path for smart high school students from families with little money to send their kids to an out-of-state college. Like Steve, she attended UMO with the help of scholarships and part-time campus jobs. Once she got to college, she hoped to find freedom from the restraints that had held her back intellectually. Instead, she encountered new forms of sexism. She recalled how one professor would regularly scrawl across the top of the term papers of female students, Drop out and get married.

Persevering, she brushed such slights aside despite not being sure of her academic focus. For a while, she changed her major about once a semester. She eventually settled into English and history. After graduation she planned to pursue a master’s in library science and become a full-time librarian.

At least that was the plan. Meeting Steve changed all that.

“I knew Tabby was my ideal reader from the first time that I gave her something to read, before we were married, which was a story called ‘I Am the Doorway,’ and she told me it was really good,” he said. “That’s usually the extent of her comments, if she likes something.” Of course, he would in time find out that if she didn’t like something, she wouldn’t hesitate to tell him and follow it up with suggestions for how he could improve his work.

From the first time they met—Steve got loaded on their first date—they were joined at the hip. They understood each other and were interested in the same things.

By dating Tabitha, Steve instantly joined a big family, the kind he’d never had but always dreamed of.

As part of the requirements to earn his certificate to teach high school when he graduated, Steve started student teaching in January of 1970 at Hampden Academy, a public high school in nearby Hampden, Maine. Though it added significantly to his workload, he continued to take classes, study, read, and write while also teaching English.

By this time, he and Tabby were living together at the Springer Cabins by the Stillwater River in Orono. They were notoriously cheap accommodations, but since they were both in school and money was rare, it was all they could afford. This was especially important since Tabby was already three months pregnant. She continued to go to classes despite stares of disapproval, especially from her male professors. Though Roe v. Wade was still three years down the road, abortions were available if inquiries were made through the right circles. Since free love ran rampant in the late sixties and early seventies, many women opted for abortion rather than for birth, because motherhood was viewed as “square” in many circles at the time.

Which described Steve and Tabby to a T. Although Steve had taken more than his fair share of drugs and led marches to the president’s house to make outrageous demands, his worldview hadn’t strayed far from that of his conservative childhood. Abortion was not an option. Besides, Tabby was raised Catholic and they had already planned to marry after Steve graduated from college.

Most likely, to Steve, aborting a child was the same as abandoning one, and he swore he would refuse to do anything that smacked of his father’s behavior toward his family. So Steve and Tabby soldiered on. Though Steve had never had any trouble finding the motivation to write, now he had even more incentive. Writing, he believed, would be their ticket out of a difficult life. He had recently started to send some of his short fiction to men’s magazines such as Gallery and Cavalier, and he began to sell a story here and there. They paid only a couple of hundred bucks, but to Steve, it was a fortune.

One day in March, Steve was working at the library when the librarian set out several reams of bright green paper for students, free for the taking. It was easy to see why the staff had no use for the paper: the sheets were as thick as cardboard and wouldn’t easily roll through typewriters. They measured seven by ten inches, an irregular size that professors would frown on.

Most of the students passed, but Steve took as much as he could. While he knew that most people viewed a blank sheet of paper with abject fear, to him it represented great promise. He regarded the paper, with its unusual size and color, as a gift. He wanted to save it for something special and ran his fingers over the reams as he giddily compared himself to “an alcoholic contemplating a case of Chivas Regal, or a sex maniac receiving a visit from a couple of hundred willing young virgins.” He took the paper back to the cabins, rolled the first sheet into the same Underwood typewriter he had banged away on since childhood—he’d finally brought it down from Durham—and typed the first line of a novel whose idea he had based on a Robert Browning poem, “Childe Roland,” about a young man’s quest through an unfamiliar and dark landscape to a faraway tower.

“The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.”

In addition to the detective, horror, science fiction, and comic books King was reading, he was exploring another genre popular at the time: fantasy, most notably Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series.

“I was just knocked out by the magic of the stories, by the idea of the quest, the broadness of it, and how long it took to tell the tales,” he said. Naturally, he thought about writing his own book along the same lines, and as he worked on the first of a projected seven-book series, he knew he had to consciously avoid Tolkien’s style and stories. At the same time, he knew he wanted the books to have one foot in the fantasy world and one foot in the real one.

While he began to explore the world of the character Roland Deschain, he worked feverishly on other stories and novels while also finishing up the course work he needed to graduate. He continued to tell anyone within earshot that his goal was to become a full-time writer. Unlike many of his fellow students, who were succumbing to the pessimism of the Vietnam War period, Steve was still incredibly optimistic about his future. As a result, he saw opportunity and ideas in absolutely everything that crossed his path, even in a bunch of paper that nobody else wanted.

It would take twelve more years, but that oddly shaped green paper would serve as the genesis of his Dark Tower series.