THE MAKING OF ‘CARRIE’
A native of Portland, Maine, Stephen King was born in September 1947. He began writing at an early age, making up stories about scenes from comic books and movies and falling in love with William Golding’s classic “Lord of the Flies.”
He began writing sports news stories for a weekly newspaper and sold his first fiction story — “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber” — to Comics Review magazine in 1965. At the University of Maine, he wrote for the student newspaper, enrolled in writing workshops and graduated in 1970.
He landed a job as a public school English teacher and continued to sell short stories to magazines like Cavalier, which was marketed toward men. He also worked on ideas for novels. One was an anti-war book and the other was about a man who time-travels to 1963 to try to halt John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
King wrote a short story about a girl coming of age and discovering she
had supernatural powers of telekinesis. He wrote the story hoping to sell it to Cavalier but gave up hope that it could find a home. At one point his wife, Tabitha, fished his manuscript out of the garbage and encouraged him to keep working on it. King
fleshed it out, turning it into a novella and then a full-length novel.
Doubleday bought the book and published 30,000 copies of the hardcover on April 5, 1974. An editor at the parent company of Signet
Books read the novel overnight and took it to his publishers, who offered Doubleday $400,000 for mass-market paperback rights. Half of the advance went to King, who was able to quit his teaching job and write full time.
Signet published the U.S. version of the softcover “Carrie” in April 1975, intentionally leaving the title and King’s name off the cover. Instead, those appeared on the inside.
The paperback sold 1 million copies in its first year of release and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 14 weeks.
Horror movie master Brian De Palma paid King just $2,500 for the movie rights. His adaptation, starring Sissy Spacek, Amy Irving, William Katt, John Travolta and Piper Laurie, was released in November 1976. It grossed $25.8 million worldwide and was nominated for two Academy Awards.