Editor’s note: This story was originally published by the Portland Press Herald on April 11, 1999.

Twenty-five years ago, a monster was unleashed on the world. It came from Maine.

The terror began with a small-town girl named Carrie who turned her prom night into a bloody mess. Her story started as a book and became a cult-classic movie. And her creator became the best-selling author of his time and a household name: Stephen King.

With the ferocity of his monstrous characters, King has roared to incredible success and influence in the fields of popular literature, film and television in the quarter-century since the publication of “Carrie” on April 5, 1974. He has more than 300 million copies of his books in print and earns a salary estimated at more than $40 million a year. And everyone knows his name.

His impact on pop culture is enormous. In 1996, he was the first author to have books in four of the top five spots on the New York Times list of paperback best-sellers. From his 34 novels and 19 other books, 26 feature films and nine TV movies have been made. His popularity among young readers has made him a force in education; his books often get kids to read when teacher-assigned material won’t.

He’s also put Maine on the pop-culture map by placing it in so many of his stories and films. His hometown’s name is synonymous with his; when you think of Bangor, you think of Stephen King.

“In the canon of serious literature, he probably won’t be remembered, except as a blockbuster who made a lot of dough,” said Gary Goshgarian, an English professor at Northeastern University in Boston who has taught King’s fiction to students. “But the average American will look at him as a benchmark in pop culture who became synonymous with scary TV, scary movies and scary books.”

Not bad for a gangly kid from tiny Durham, Maine, who was rejected by the draft board for high blood pressure, bad eyesight, flat feet and punctured ear drums.

Stephen King was born in Portland in 1947 to Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. His parents separated when King was a toddler, and he spent parts of his childhood in Indiana and Connecticut before moving to Durham with his family when he was 11. His mother was a kitchen worker at Pineland, a facility (housing people with intellectual disabilities) in New Gloucester.

He graduated from Lisbon Falls High School and then from the University of Maine in 1970, with a degree in English and a teaching certificate. At UMaine’s Fogler Library, he met Tabitha Spruce. They married in 1971 and had three children.

King was teaching English at Hampden Academy and writing at night when Doubleday accepted “Carrie” for publication in 1973. It was the story of an awkward teen-age girl who is asked to the prom but only so that cruel classmates can make fun of her. She, however, has powers none of the harassers can imagine, and she unleashes her rage right there in the school gym.

The book was released in 1974 and sold well enough for King to take up writing full-time. Two years later, Brian DePalma turned the book into a riveting film starring Sissy Spacek. Together, the book and the film launched King’s rise to super-stardom.

“Carrie” was the beginning of King’s impact on book publishing and the horror genre in particular. He made horror respectable and bankable.

“King, to a large extent, was instrumental in showing publishers that horror could be a best-selling genre,” said George Beahm, a Virginia-based author who has written five books about King. “It wasn’t that people didn’t want to read horror, per se. It was that they wanted good writing.”

After “Carrie,” King rolled out one horror blockbuster after another — “Salem’s Lot” in 1975, “The Shining” in 1977, “The Stand” in 1978 and “The Dead Zone” in 1979.

Goshgarian thinks King’s work became popular because he added a literary quality to horror and because he rooted his horrific tales in small-town America. “His books hit at the heart of American culture,” Goshgarian said. “He surrounds his characters with Twinkies and Big Macs and dogs and cats. He surrounds the supernatural elements with real references, making it more credible.”

King’s supernatural stories have, ironically, become so credible that his fans are devoted.

Kevin Davis, 30, says he’s read all but three of King’s novels. He started reading them as a junior high school student in Topsham. He was assigned Dickens in his English class, but what he wanted to read was King. The habit never left him.

“He’s a really good writer, and I just find his stuff really enjoyable,” said Davis, who manages the Bookland store in downtown Portland. “I think he’s under-appreciated. People know him for his supernatural stuff, but he can write great character-driven stories too.”

By the early 1980s, King was one of the best-selling authors in the country. He was one of the first, if not the first, author to become a brand name. His books were guaranteed big sales, and movies and TV projects with his name attached had added clout.

By becoming a brand name, King helped change publishing. When he started, publishers were happy to put out a wide selection of books and hope for modest sales; in 1975, 30,000 copies would get you on the New York Times best-sellers list.

Now, thanks to King and others including John Grisham and Danielle Steel, authors on the list are selling a million or more.

“His success helped publishers do what movies were doing, pushing things with high marketability and reaching a wide audience,” Goshgarian said. “Here was King, who is prolific and captures a wide audience, and he became a cash cow for them.”

King helped elevate the status — and wallets — of popular authors to that of movie and TV stars. In the 1990s, King has often appeared in the Forbes magazine list of the 40 highest-paid entertainers. In 1997, he ranked eighth on the list, with an income of $50 million, behind the likes of Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Seinfeld. Only a handful of other authors have made the list this decade, including Tom Clancy, John Grisham and Michael Crichton.

“He really set a standard other writers try to emulate, selling so many books,” said Daisy Maryles, executive editor of Publishers Weekly magazine. “If you want to be one of the five best-selling authors, you’ve got to outdo King.”

With sales and money comes clout, and here’s where King helped change the publishing industry even more. In 1989, he signed a huge contract with Viking/Penguin, guaranteeing him $35 million for four books, helping to raise the ante for big-name authors. But now he seems to be leading a trend in the other direction, signing a deal two years ago with Simon & Schuster that guaranteed him only $2 million per book and a big percentage of the profits; some reports put it at 50 percent.

“With this latest deal, he’s becoming a leader among major authors, taking less up front and becoming a partner with the publisher,” Maryles said. “The fact that he talks about it publicly makes him a pioneer among authors.”

Maryles said another thing that makes King so strong in his field is that he’s versatile and willing to take chances. He doesn’t write just horror. He writes short stories. He wrote the serialized “The Green Mile.” He writes for television. And his stories have been made into some great non-horror films, including “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Stand by Me.”

He’s become a player in movies and television. His “Green Mile” is being made into a film starring two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks; it is due out this fall. His horror or thriller tales seem perfect for television, given the expansive canvas of the mini-series.

“The mini-series lets him expand and tell his stories in that rambling and very populist way of his,” said Matt Roush, a critic for TV Guide. “TV networks don’t offer mini-series to many authors, but they do to him.”

A Stephen King TV project usually gets strong ratings, Roush said. This February, ABC showed his “Storm of the Century” over three nights. The final night went up against George Clooney’s touted departure from “ER” on NBC and got ABC’s best Thursday ratings in a long time, Roush said.

“If anyone attaches his name to a story, they have ‘event television’ right there,” Roush said.

King wrote “Storm of the Century” directly for TV, and it was one of several King stories that have been filmed in Maine. The town of Southwest Harbor was covered with fake snow last summer, and it appeared prominently throughout the series.

In the late 1980s, King helped steer the production of two films of his books, “Pet Sematary” and “Graveyard Shift,” to Maine. Around the same time, he spoke before the Maine Legislature about the need for a state office to help foster film production in Maine.

Within a year, the Maine Film Commission, now the Maine Film Office, was created. In recent years, the office has helped attract such big-budget Hollywood films as “The Preacher’s Wife” and “Message in a Bottle” to Maine.

“He’s really gone out of his way to bring film and TV projects to this state,” said Greg Gadberry, assistant director of the Maine Film Office. “If anyone can be called the parent of the film and TV industry here, it’s Stephen King.”

Besides bringing film projects to his home state, King has donated millions to politicians, including Gov. Angus King, and local causes such as libraries and Little League baseball, and he doesn’t shy away from local people. He and his wife are regulars at University of Maine women’s basketball games in Orono.

But he shies away from interviews. Though King has done interviews with national publications, he is rarely available for interviews with Maine newspapers. He declined to be interviewed for this story.

Meanwhile, the King juggernaut keeps on rolling. His new novel, “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” hit bookstores Tuesday, the 25th anniversary of “Carrie.” It’s the story of Trisha McFarland, a 9-year-old who gets lost in the Maine woods during a family hike. She takes comfort in listening to the Red Sox on the radio, especially the exploits of her hero, relief pitcher Tom Gordon.

King, a rabid Red Sox fan, said he wrote the story after becoming fascinated with Gordon’s trademark of pointing to the sky after every save, giving credit to God.

Just how long King’s reign as a pop-culture king will last is an open question. This year, People magazine named King one of the “25 Legends of the Past 25 Years.” In the People article, King hinted that, at age 51, he might not want to write novels for much longer.

“I don’t want to be the grand ol’ man,” King told People. “I don’t want to be led up to accept my grand master awards on somebody’s arms. I certainly don’t want to descend into self-parody.”

Linda Madsen, library assistant, contributed research to this story.

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