Stephen King had a traumatic early childhood, one he did not write himself but one ever present in his haunting stories...

When King was just two years old, his father abandoned his family leaving his mother to take care of two kids without any stable source of income.

Two years later, when Stephen King was 4 years old, he witnessed his friend being struck and killed by a train. The ordeal left him mute and socially unresponsive with shock for days. 

It can only be speculated whether he  witnessed the accident, its aftermath or both, as King himself has no conscious memory of the tragic event. 

What we know:

One morning, he went out to play with his best friend. Their destination was always the wild fields he would come to call The Barrens, enticingly close to a railroad line. 

Little Stephen would return an hour later, alone, completely silent, pale, and in shock 

His mother later learned that the boy he was playing with had been killed by an onrushing freight train.

The Memory Gap: King has stated he has no personal memory of the accident itself. He only knows the story because his mother told him about it years later. 

Connection to His Work Inspiration: 

•The Body (adapted into the film Stand by Me), which features boys walking along train tracks to find the missing body of Ray Brower, a kid struck and killed by an onrushing freight train.

•The Long Walk:

During Chapter 6 of the brutal walk, the protagonist Ray Garraty begins thinking about death. He recalls that before the competition, his friend George "Freaky" D'Allessio was the only dead person he had ever seen. 

The Accident: A car struck Freaky's Schwinn bicycle on U.S. 1 outside of Freeport. The impact threw him completely over the handlebars, causing him to fly into a stone wall where he died instantly...

How did Stephen King's early years shape his life, his work...?

"Write about what you know" He says. 

"Write about what you know..." Stephen King