On this day in 1947, a woman named Nellie Ruth King gave
birth to a son in a modest hospital in Portland, Maine. Nobody in that delivery
room could have guessed that the boy, christened Stephen Edwin King, would grow
up to reshape the landscape of popular fiction, sell more than 350 million
books worldwide, and become so synonymous with horror that his very surname now
functions as shorthand for the genre itself. Today, as Stephen King marks his
79th birthday, it is worth pausing to consid...