Stephen King: Before and After CARRIE
The man that thought his life was a tower of pity became one of the best known horror writers around the world. “With his long legs under a child’s desk, Stephen King, hunched over his typewriter in the trailer’s tiny room… he started his story with a lonely teenage girl in the shower room at school, humiliated and ostracized by her classmates” (qtd Bloom 5).
Stephen King’s horror inserts spiked when he found an old box full of SiFi and horror comics in his aunt’s house in the year of 1959. Because of this discovery, Stephen King, wrote his first short horror story titled “I was a Teenage Grave Robber” one year later, and got it published in a science fiction magazine. King was a rather poor man. He did not have the best jobs and got paid very little for his labor. His first job was at a Laundromat.
Then, he moved up to a janitor. His last job before he became a writer was a high school English teacher. One late night King came home, worn down and tire from the full day of labor he preformed. He sat down at his typewriter and stated clicking and tapping keys. Soon the clicking of keys turned in to the story of young Carrie White. He started her journey in life in the locker rooms at school.
He created a girl that was sixteen and had never started her period. He decided to make her get in the middle of her shower at school. He thought what if this girl had a talent that no one else has. He gave her the gift of telekinesis. He makes it so the talent only appeared when she was angry or her social group laughed at her.
As soon as King made it this far along, he removed the papers from the typewriter, got up and disposed the paper in the waste basket. Later that week King’s wife Tabitha was dumping the trash and came across his story. She sat down and started to read the story on little Carrie White life. When King came home that night from a long day of work, Tabitha met him at the door holding Carrie in her hands. She encouraged him to continue the story. King kept telling her that it was not worthy for human eyes and that he knew nothing about teenage girls.
Tabitha insisted that she would help him on the parts that need a woman’s expertise. When the novel was completed, Tabitha’s grandmother gave $75 to King to go out and buy a new pair of shoes and to catch a bus to New York to visit with Double Play. Double Play offered him $2,500 for the rights to Carrie. They would make Carrie a hard copy book. King accepted and when out to buy Tabitha a $16.95 hairdryer for believing him.
13,000 hardback copies were sold, but sadly King’s mom was never to see Carrie in print. On May 12, 1973, King got a phone call that changed his life forever. Double Play sold the rights to reprint Carrie to New American Library for $400,000, and King was to get haft. 2.5 million Paperback copies of Carrie were sold in the U.S alone.
Carrie was also sold in 35 different countries and 33 different languages. Because of the demand for more Stephen King book, King had to quit being a teacher and become a writer full time. King accepted and started writing books right away. His next book was Salem’s Lot. That idea was formed when King was teaching his English class about the book Dracula.
(He thought what if Dracula was to come to a small town.) The teacher has left the building; he is making money, writing horror, and enjoying life. Now he is not know as Mr. King the high school English teacher, but as Stephen King (the horror king) the man that can make anything a horror story.
