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about 1949 into the 1950s, bracketed
The claim, and its limit: This is the thinnest claim in the leg, and it is printed thin, on purpose, because the name is the biggest on the page. Stephen King was born on 21 September 1947 in Portland, Maine. He was not born in Fort Wayne, not raised in Fort Wayne, and not formed in Fort Wayne, and any telling that says otherwise is wrong. What the authorized biography says, and what this section prints, is narrower and true. When King was two, his father walked out, and his mother, Ruth King, raised her sons where family could help. In the words of the biography carried by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation: "Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut." When Stephen was eleven, his mother took the boys back to Durham, Maine, for good. Fort Wayne's share of the most successful storyteller of the age is therefore a share: some part of a childhood between the ages of about two and eleven, spent among his father's people in this city, the exact years, duration and address unfixed in the sources found [about 1949 into the 1950s].
Why he is here at all: A fame roll that silently omitted him would leave its readers to find the Fort Wayne connection elsewhere, very possibly in the inflated form this entry exists to correct. Printed honestly, the sojourn is worth a paragraph of wonder on its own terms. Sometime around 1950, in a house in Fort Wayne, there was a small boy, recently abandoned by his father, living among relatives, years before Carrie, before the standpipe and the haunted hotel and the Maine that his imagination annexed. His own memoirs remember the wandering childhood's texture, the relatives, the moves, the mother working any job there was. Fort Wayne was one of the wandering's stops, the Indiana stop, with family of the father who had left. That is all of it, and this section says all of it, and the reader who came to this entry hoping for more has been given, instead, the thing this whole history runs on: the record, at its real size.
Sources:
- PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Stephen King author page (the authorized biography: born in Portland, Maine, in 1947; the father's departure when Stephen was two; "parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time"; the return to Durham, Maine, at age eleven).