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“Tabby literally picked it out of the wastebasket and brushed off the cigarette ash. She read it in bed and said, ‘This is good, you should go on.’”
It’s hard to fathom now, but there was a time when the name Stephen King didn’t mean anything. He was unknown, just some shaggy-haired fellow from Maine with a macabre imagination and a manual typewriter churning out stories with fanciful titles like “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber.”
But 50 years ago, on April 5, that all changed with the publication of “Carrie,” a twisted Cinderella story about a shy, spotty-faced teen who’s tormented by her fanatical mother and cruel classmates until — well, let’s just say she makes them stop. “Carrie” was King’s first published novel — he was only 26 at the time — and it became an enormous bestseller, the first of many in a remarkable career spanning 60-plus books with sales of more than 350 million copies. (King’s latest collection of stories, “You Like It Darker,” comes out May 21.)
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So how did “Carrie” happen? It almost didn’t. To mark the 50th anniversary of Carrie White’s harrowing arrival on our collective nightstands, syllabuses, library shelves, and movie screens, we asked King and others, including prominent horror writers, readers, and longtime friends of the author, why, after all these years, “Carrie” still captivates — and terrifies — us.
Interviews that follow have been edited and condensed.
I tried to get an hour a night if I possibly could. And it was important to me because, you know, at that time, we were, you know, scraping bottom. We had two kids. We were young, and I had a Texaco credit card, and my wife cut it up, and she said, “We can't afford the interest on these things.” So, that went by the boards. She said, “Pay cash for everything.”
Stephen King: Before college, I used to buy a lot of 35-cent paperbacks at Roberts [Pharmacy] in Lisbon Falls — lots of Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber. I also read every EC horror comic I could get my hands on. There were piles of them, covers ripped off, at a junk store across from [McCarthy’s] Red & White Market.
Jim Smith, University of Maine roommate: I’d seen this big, hulking guy with long black hair — black as a clarinet — and a black beard. He’d come into the student newspaper, fire up a Pall Mall, and when that one was done, he’d smoke another one. He was a chimney.
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Jim Bishop, retired UMaine English instructor: I gave Steve a C+ on the first freshman composition paper I assigned. He decided that he’d better up his game after that, I guess.
Philip “Flip” Thompson, UMaine friend: Steve had a typewriter in his room and he’d rat-a-tat-tat on it all the time. He was writing short stories that he’d sell to skin magazines.
Smith: I never, at any point, knew Stephen King when he wasn’t reading a book. He always had a book. He read a lot of what I’d call muscular fiction, stuff drenched in testosterone, and a lot of classic noir.
Bishop: I’m not sure how hard-working Steve was in a number of his classes, but he was very hard-working on his own stuff.
King and his brother were raised by their mother in the Central Maine town of Durham. As a teenager, he hitchhiked on weekends to Lewiston’s Ritz Theatre to see movies like “Lady in a Cage,” “The Haunting,” and “The Wild Angels.” King graduated from UMaine in 1970 and a year later married writer Tabitha Spruce, whom he’d started dating in college. He worked for a while at New Franklin Laundry in Bangor, making $1.60 an hour washing dirty tablecloths and bloody hospital linens. He was writing throughout, selling stories for as much as $200 to magazines like “Dude,” “Cavalier,” and “Swank.” In 1971, King got a job teaching English at Hampden Academy. Tabitha worked second shift at Dunkin’ Donuts.
King: We were scraping bottom. We were young and had two kids. I had a Texaco credit card and my wife cut it up. She said, “We can’t afford the interest on those things. Pay cash for everything.” It wasn’t really the greatest situation in the world.
Tabitha King, from the forward to a 1991 edition of “Carrie”: We lived in a trailer in Hermon. Steve wrote in a closet-sized room that was supposed to be the laundry room. We didn’t own a washer or a dryer. The room was just big enough for a desk, a chair, a trashcan, and a writer.
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Bishop: Steve was not to the manor born. They were living hand to mouth.
Tabitha: We had horrendous battles over the five bucks he spent each week for a carton of cigarettes and his overdue fines at the library.
Douglas Winter, author of the biography “Stephen King: The Art of Darkness”: I remember Tabby telling me she couldn’t stay in the hospital after giving birth to their son Joe because they didn’t have the money.
King: The best-case scenario was very simple: I wanted to support myself as a writer. I wanted to stop teaching. It was like having jumper cables attached to your brain — it drains you. I didn’t like all the [expletive] that went with it. There was a dress code. You didn’t have to wear a tie, but you did have to wear a jacket. And you had to kowtow to the department head and be collegial. It wasn’t my bag.
Smith, King’s college roommate: Steve used to give me a few things to read. There was nothing I could add. I wasn’t looking at it critically, I was just eating it up. When I had a chance to read anything, especially something of length, it was like having dinner rather than breakfast.
Hammering away on an Olivetti typewriter that belonged to Tabitha, King wrote for at least an hour every night. He had read a Life magazine story about telekinesis and thought he might be able to create a story about a teenage girl who made things happen with her mind. He imagined an opening scene in which the girl gets her period in the shower after gym and is mocked and pelted with tampons by her classmates. But he wasn’t sure he could do it.
King: It was intimidating to write from the female perspective. I knew how they talked and how they walked. I didn’t know how they thought. I don’t think any man really does. A young man trying to write female characters was a little different then.
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Neil McRobert, host of the “Talking Scared” podcast: He’s wondering to himself, “Can I write this story about a young girl?” and “Do I have time to stop writing these stories that are paying the bills to write a novel I may not be able to sell?”
Christopher Golden, horror novelist, coauthor of “The Stephen King Universe: The Guide to the Worlds of the King of Horror”: He gave up — either because he didn’t think it was good enough or because he thought he was biting off more than he could chew.
King: I threw it away. It was too hard, for one thing. And it was going to be too long to be a short story. It was already 3,000 words — I wrote single space then, margin to margin, because paper was expensive.
McRobert: There are two great origin stories in horror literature. There’s “Frankenstein,” which Mary Shelley wrote while trapped indoors during the year without a summer, and there’s “Carrie.”
It was about poltergeist activity, and the article made it clear that there was a troubled teenage girl with a family. And, when she was absent, nothing happened. But when she was there, objects fell off tables and shattered.
King: Tabby literally picked it out of the wastebasket and brushed off the cigarette ash. She read it in bed and said, “This is good, you should go on.” I said, “I don’t know that much about girls.” She said, “I’ll help you.” And then — she could be very sharp — she said, “Use your [expletive] imagination!”
Golden: There are still trolls who say, ‘Oh, Tabitha must have written that.’ The verisimilitude is so great that people think because you’re a dude, you couldn’t possibly have written it.
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Smith: He wrote it like he might have been a woman in a former life.
King: It was exciting to put the dress on. I did the best I could.
Golden: King has written about parallel universes, and if there is such a thing, then there’s a universe in which Tabitha doesn’t pull “Carrie” out of the trash. What happens then?
Tananarive Due, horror novelist and academic: The story about “Carrie” being in a trashcan is almost as scary as the book. How close we came to never having it!
King, who was then 25, had already written three novels — all rejected by publishers. (Years later, “Rage,” “The Long Walk,” and “The Running Man” would be published.) Nonetheless, he finished “Carrie” and sent it to Bill Thompson, an encouraging editor at Doubleday.
Smith: Steve was feeling like, “When the hell is it going to happen?”
Winter, biographer: King was pretty much convinced that Doubleday was going to reject it. He was somewhat in crisis mode, feeling a lot of pressure. It’s very much like the early days of NASA — you learn by failing, you learn by rejection.
Grady Hendrix, horror novelist, author of “Paperbacks from Hell”: By 1974, you had editors who realized there was a market for horror. King was the right guy at the right time.
King: I got a message during my free period at Hampden Academy: “Stephen King, please come to the office. Your wife is on the phone.” I thought one of the kids had a horrible accident or they’re going to publish the book.
Telegram from Bill Thompson: “‘Carrie’ officially a Doubleday book. Is $2,500 advance OK? Call for glorious details. The future lies ahead. Love, Bill.”
King: Doubleday was a book factory then. They published tons of books. The big deal was Peter Benchley’s “Jaws,” which was published the same year. “Carrie” was not a big deal.
Winter: $2,500 shows they didn’t have a great deal of faith in the book.
Bishop, UMaine instructor: I got a call from Steve. He’d found out “Carrie” had been accepted for publication and he invited some of us to a party. I think there was a keg of beer.
Before “Carrie,” there were only a few highly regarded horror novels: “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Other,” and “The Exorcist.” But King’s book about a group of high school students was more relatable. Everyone knew an awkward, unpopular kid like Carrie White and how they’re sometimes mistreated by callous classmates. King certainly did. Carrie White is a composite of two girls he’d gone to school with.
King: One wore the same clothes every day — every day. Then, at Christmas, she got new clothes — a pretty skirt and sweater — and the meanness didn’t go away, it redoubled. It got worse. You could just see her fade and shrivel. It was terrible. I never took part, but I was never somebody who stood up heroically for her and said, “You must stop that!”
Golden: The distance in days between when King was in classrooms with the people who were the inspiration for these characters and the time he started writing “Carrie” isn’t many.
Tabitha: Steve and I were then much closer to high school. We hadn’t scraped it off our feet.
Nancy Allen, actress, plays Carrie’s nemesis, Chris Hargensen, in the 1976 movie adaptation: I went to an all-girls Catholic school and there was a Carrie character. She got up one day to go to the lunchroom and there was a big red stain on the back of her skirt. We all thought, “Oh my God!” Kids in school can be so mean.
Hendrix: King’s also a gross writer. He really goes there in “Carrie.” It was unique at the time for someone to write a realist novel about teenagers and talk about acne and boogers and periods.
McRobert, podcast host: There’s a startling lack of discourse around the fact that this book from the early ‘70s makes menstruation a focal point. Even now in horror — and I read all the horror — you never see menstrual blood.
This girl always wore the same clothes to school every day. Every day she wore the same clothes. And then one year at Christmas, she got different clothes, and the meanness redoubled. It didn’t go away. It redoubled. And you could see her just sort of fade and shrivel. That was a terrible thing to see. I never took part, but I was never somebody who stood up heroically for these people and said, “Oh, you must stop.”
King: A young man writing these women characters. I think it’s one of the reasons it got published. A lot of women read it. It’s like that thing Samuel Johnson said: “A woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well; you’re surprised to find it done at all.”
Sadie Hartmann, a.k.a. “Mother Horror,” author of “101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered”: I was 15 — gawky and nerdy — when I read “Carrie,” and I was taken aback that a man was able to get inside the head of a teenage girl — her experience of being this misfit, of not knowing what to do with her body. Carrie is so very isolated and King was able to capture that.
Michelle Souliere, owner of Green Hand Bookshop in Portland, Maine: The female experience is a horror — a constant body horror — and it’s all right there in “Carrie.”
King: I don’t think you know what you’re writing about until you’re actually doing it. You say to yourself, “What’s this about?” I thought, to a degree, “Carrie” was about the empowerment of a girl who was standing up for herself. I was interested in the idea that Carrie would pull the house down. I just didn’t know what the house was when I started writing the book.
Due, novelist: A lot of women feel seen by “Carrie.” But for me, it wasn’t so much about gender. I felt like an outsider because of my race. I was never personally bullied like what Carrie experienced, but there was an undercurrent of feeling unsafe and unwelcome. ... The prom night sequence, while tragic and terrifying, is the most satisfying part of the novel for me because Carrie is in her full power, and that one brief, shining moment encapsulates what revenge horror is supposed to feel like.
San Francisco Chronicle, July 7, 1974: “A truly perceptive study of thoughtless human cruelty and resultant suffering.”
Fort Worth Star-Telegram, May 5, 1974: “Don’t read it late at night if you’re alone in the house. The last 50 pages are enough to make John Wayne sleep with a night light.”
Hartford Courant, May 19, 1974: “The so-called youth culture has gone too far when someone who can write well writes such a maudlin and macabre book. ... Anyone who likes horror and sheer dirt will get his fill.”
Despite generally good reviews, the hardcover edition of “Carrie” sold a modest 13,000 copies. (By comparison, “Jaws” sold 9 million copies in the first year, buoyed by Steven Spielberg’s movie, which came out six months after the book.) Still, Signet Books saw potential in “Carrie.” “Are you sitting down?” said Doubleday editor Thompson in a call to King. Signet had paid $400,000 for the paperback rights — the equivalent of $2.7 million today — of which King would receive half. He could feel his legs begin to shake.
King: Tabby was at her parents’ when I got the news. I couldn’t think what to do, so I walked downtown — it was a Sunday and everything was closed except for the drugstore. I bought her a hair dryer.
Smith: It was liberating in the sense that Steve wasn’t going to have to teach students who didn’t give a damn anymore, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to have to work in a commercial laundry. It was the actualization of the picture he had of himself in his head the whole time I knew him.
If you’re even halfway smart, you say to yourself, "Why am I wasting my time doing this? Why am I spending my time? What's it about?” And I thought, to a degree, it was about the empowerment of a girl who was standing up for herself.
King: Now I could just write stories. When the movie dropped, the paperback became a bestseller, and I was off.
Richard Chizmar, friend and novelist, coauthor with King of the novella “Gwendy’s Button Box”: The first time I met Steve was at a 25th anniversary party for “Carrie” at Tavern on the Green in New York. Kathy Bates was there, and Salman Rushdie, Peter Straub, and Jack Ketchum. I still have the postcard invitation. On the bottom, it says: “blue jeans are fine.” People ask me, “What’s he like?” I tell them Steve is blue jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt. He hasn’t gone Hollywood.
Smith: Steve is still a homey.
Director Brian De Palma’s “Carrie” came out two years after the book, with Sissy Spacek as the tormented title character and Piper Laurie as her monstrous mother, the shrill Margaret White. (Spacek and Laurie both earned Oscar nominations.) The movie, hailed by critic Roger Ebert as “absolutely spellbinding,” hews closely to the book, including the ominous opening scene in the girls’ shower.
King: I thought it was fantastic. The music was just right and I loved the soft-focus look of the shower room, with all the steam coming up. The movie also has that wonderful jumpscare at the end.
Allen, actress: Shooting that shower scene was much more difficult than I would have imagined. It was a frenzy, like something else took over. I remember shooting it in one take. I don’t think we shot it again. We were all traumatized. Everybody was really unsettled.
Smith: Steve got in touch and asked if I wanted to join him at the premiere, which was in Portland. I remember the movie vividly. All that blood. It was a very pleasurable experience.
Paul Tremblay, whose horror novel “The Cabin at the End of the World” is the basis of director M. Night Shyamalan’s movie “Knock at the Cabin”: The movie “Carrie” is in the same emotional frequency as the book. De Palma totally nails not only the teenage angst of the book, but also the sorrow, the tragedy, of what happens to Carrie.
Nat Cassidy, author of “Mary: An Awakening of Terror,” a peri-menopausal homage to “Carrie”: Carrie White became a matron saint for me. As a kid, I’d talk to her: “I’ll be your friend, please don’t hurt me.” I think, without discounting King’s genius as a writer, the fact that De Palma makes an incredible movie at such a key moment — in publishing history, in cinematic history, in King’s writing career — helped create Stephen King as the cultural force we think of him as today.
Golden, novelist: Once King comes onto the stage with “Carrie,” horror really solidifies as an American genre. It becomes about characters who couldn’t exist anywhere in the world except this country. “Carrie” is the “American Graffiti” of horror novels.
Hendrix: The movie did a great service to the book. “The Simpsons” has “Carrie” jokes from time to time. We should all be so lucky.
The movie’s box-office success supercharged sales of the book, which in turn led religious groups and anxious parents around the country to try to ban “Carrie” from schools and libraries.
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom: For a long time, “Carrie” was among the most challenged books in our database. But as young adult literature has evolved and horror has been accepted as a genre, we’ve seen fewer challenges. The first recorded challenge was in 1975 at Clark High School in Las Vegas. Somebody considered “Carrie” to be low-value literature. They called it “trash” and it was removed from the school library.
Due: The version I read was the paperback with the movie tie-in, so Sissy Spacek was on the cover in a blood-drenched prom gown — who can resist that cover? — and my mother was OK with it. Is that one of the reasons I became a horror writer? Of course.
King: I tell kids, “If you can’t get it in your library, rush out to the bookstore and find out what it is that your elders don’t want you to read.”
In the five decades since “Carrie” was published, King has written dozens of books and become one of the biggest-selling authors of all time. His name is known around the world and “Carrie” is considered a modern classic — it’s influenced generations of writers and been a topic of dissertations and literary conferences. But King, it turns out, is ambivalent about the book that ignited his career. He’s grateful for its success, of course, but believes he’s a better writer at 76 than he was at 26.
King: I would say it changed my life, yes, but I’ve never really liked “Carrie” all that much. I realize it’s done a lot for me — because of “Carrie,” I was able to write full time. What I wanted was to spend my time writing stories, and I’ve done that.
Mark Shanahan can be reached at mark.shanahan@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter.
Design and Illustrations by Ryan Huddle/Globe staff; Audio players A Flourish data visualization .
Mark Shanahan can be reached at mark.shanahan@globe.com. Follow him @MarkAShanahan.