After a van nearly killed Stephen King on a Maine roadside in 1999, he turned the near-death into a safety net for other writers. To help freelance artists who were left with nothing after an accident or illness, people he said had “little or no financial cushion,” he started the Haven Foundation.
That’s one piece of a longer habit. For nearly 50 years King ran his “Dollar Baby” deal, licensing short stories to student and aspiring filmmakers for $1 each, a program he started in 1977 against his advisers’ advice and ended in December 2023.
Frank Darabont wrote to him at 20, before he had any movie job, and got a yes. When Darabont asked again in 1986 for The Shawshank Redemption, King said yes again.
He gives closer to home too. Launched in 1986, the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation gives away roughly $3 million annually, nearly all of it in Maine, and operates a Bangor writers’ residency that pays each writer a $2,500 honorarium.
In December 2011, his Bangor radio stations ran a heating-oil drive for low-income families that passed $240,000 after King matched an anonymous $50,000 pledge.
King knows the other side of the slush pile. In On Writing, he recalled that when he was 16, an editor scribbled on a rejection slip, “This is good. Not for us, but good. You have talent. Submit again.”