It's been 50 years since Stephen King's first novel was published. Carrie was published on April 5, 1974, and adapted for the big screen a couple of years later. But it almost wasn't written at all. In the early 1970s, King was teaching and taking on other part time jobs while writing short stories for magazines. His wife Tabby, also an aspiring writer, was taking care of a baby and working part time when she could. They were barely getting by. King's short stories were often rejected, but were most likely to be accepted by men's magazines, where science fiction and horror were sandwiched between pinups, leading to an accusation that King couldn't write a decent woman character. He took that as a challenge.
King developed the character Carrie from two women he knew in school who were badly treated by their peers. But he didn't like what he wrote, and tossed page after page in the trash. Tabby discovered those pages and offered her help in fleshing out the character. The story ended up being too long for a magazine, so it went to a book publisher. Carrie changed the family's fortunes and set King on a 50-year career trajectory. Read how Carrie came about at Mental Floss.
