Carrie

Carrie is Stephen King's debut novel and stands alone as a complete story. While it introduces themes and elements that recur in his later works, it does not feature characters or settings that directly cross over into his other novels.

Carrie has been adapted into multiple films, most notably a 1976 version directed by Brian De Palma and a 2013 version. The 1976 film is widely regarded as a classic horror adaptation and is known for its faithful portrayal of the novel's core events.

After writing the opening locker-room scene, King felt he knew too little about high school girls to continue and threw the pages in the trash. His wife Tabitha retrieved them, read the draft, and persuaded him to keep going—telling him the premise was compelling and offering to help him understand the characters.

Stephen King drew inspiration for Carrie from his experiences as a high school teacher and his observations of social dynamics among teenagers. The character of Carrie White was partly inspired by two real-life girls he knew who were social outcasts and came from difficult home environments.

Carrie was rejected approximately 30 times before Doubleday finally accepted it. King had submitted earlier drafts of stories from the same period to magazines with similar results, and had largely resigned himself to failure by the time Doubleday said yes.

Doubleday paid $2,500 for hardcover rights—a modest sum. Shortly after, New American Library bought the paperback rights for $400,000, a figure that transformed the Kings' finances. The paperback sold over one million copies in its first year.

King has said the character was drawn from two girls he knew—one from elementary school and one from high school—both social outcasts with difficult home lives. Neither is a one-to-one portrait; the character combines elements of each, particularly the loneliness and the sense that cruelty from peers was relentless.

The story is told partly through newspaper clippings, survivor testimony, and excerpts from fictional books written after the incident—an epistolary frame that the 1976 Brian De Palma film largely drops. This structure lets King present Carrie's destruction of Chamberlain as something already completed, a disaster being reconstructed from evidence.

Rage of Carrion (not by King) and unofficial successors exist, but King has no official Carrie sequel. The 1999 television film sequel The Rage: Carrie 2 is unrelated to King's novel. King has said he has no plans to return to the character.