Carrie was the novel that started Stephen King's career, but he disliked the story so much he threw it in the trash once. Here's why.
Stephen King is one of the most popular and successful authors not only in the horror genre but in general, but the path to success wasn’t easy for him, and he actually threw a draft of his first published novel, Carrie, to the trash – and here’s why. Stephen King is now a name associated with a very specific type of horror stories, and he has rightfully earned the name of the “King of Horror”, and it all goes back to 1967, when he sold his first professional short story, “The Glass Floor”, to Startling Mystery Stories. After that, King continued to write short stories and began working on ideas for novels, and between 1966 and 1970, he wrote the draft of what would become the novel The Long Walk, as well as an unpublished anti-war novel.
It wasn’t until 1973 that Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, was published, marking the beginning of a successful career as an author, though Carrie was actually his fourth novel. What has followed are a number of novels and short stories that have allowed readers of all ages and from all parts of the world to explore a variety of fears, while also leaving a mark in them as some have discovered fears they didn’t know they have. Some of King’s most famous novels and stories are The Shining, Pet Sematary, Misery, IT, and Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, and many of them have been adapted to TV and film, sometimes more than once, but there will always be something special about the one that started it all, even if King himself didn’t see it like that at first.
King has shared that some of his works have been written during very specific and difficult points in his life, and Carrie also happened during some tough times. King and his family were living in a trailer when he came up with the idea for Carrie and started writing it on a portable typewriter that belonged to his wife, Tabitha. As they were struggling financially, King and Tabitha worked multiple jobs, and one of King’s was as a school janitor. The idea for Carrie came to him while cleaning the girls’ locker room, as he imagined an incident in the girls’ room where a telekinetic girl got her period and thought she was dying, so the other girls laughed at her and bullied her for it. King wrote the first three pages, which is the shower scene, but he tossed them in the trash as he “hated it”, explaining he couldn’t relate to Carrie’s problems and it “didn’t move him emotionally”.
What made him go back to Carrie and finish the novel was Tabitha, who found the pages in the trash, read them, and became curious to find out what would happen next. She then encouraged King to keep writing and offered to help him with the female perspective, so he finished the novel – but he still felt it wasn’t good, telling Adelina Magazine in 1980 that he “persisted because I was dry and had no better ideas” and that his “considered opinion was that I had written the world’s all-time loser”. In an interview with Playboy Magazine in 1983, King called Carrie “clumsy” and “artless", and in his memoir On My Writing, he expanded a bit more on why he didn’t like Carrie. King explained he never got to like the character of Carrie White nor he trusted Sue Nell’s motives, but ultimately, Carrie was the beginning of everything.
Carrie sold modestly at first, but sellings went up after Brian de Palma’s 1976 film adaptation, and so the novel became a bestseller. Carrie also received critical acclaim, with many calling it an impressive literary debut and it became a favorite of readers, and it continues to reach new audiences thanks to its film adaptations and its legacy as the novel that started Stephen King’s career.
