Stephen King ditched ‘Carrie’—then turned it into a bestseller

Before Carrie ever put a prom to the torch, Stephen King had already tossed the story in the trash. At home in Maine, he crumpled up the opening pages and walked away — until his wife, Tabitha King, plucked them from the wastebasket, read what he’d started, and told him not to quit on the shy girl with the strange power.

“Tabby fished it out and said, ‘You know, this is really good, so push on with it,” King recalled.

King has traced the germ of the tale to a janitor job he once worked at Brunswick High School, where cleaning the girls’ locker room — and noticing the sanitary napkin dispensers — stuck with him. Years later, while he was at an industrial laundry, that memory fused into a scene he couldn’t shake: a teenage girl getting her first period with no idea what was happening, surrounded by classmates who mock her.

That collision of adolescent humiliation, religious rigidity, and telekinetic payback became King’s blueprint for finding horror in everyday life — a thread he’d pull again in books like The Shining, It, and Misery.

The road to print

When the manuscript made it to Doubleday editor Bill Thompson — who had already read and rejected other King efforts — he saw something worth pursuing. Thompson invited King to New York. The writer, broke at the time, scraped together bus fare from his grandmother-in-law and took an overnight Greyhound from Maine to make the meeting.

He headed home with real momentum, and Doubleday soon put the book on its schedule. Released April 5, 1974, Carrie became King’s first published novel and the spark for a career that would ripple through bookstores and movie theaters for decades.