![]() ![]() Carrie faces ruthless abuse from her religious mother and bullying from high school classmates, and the book introduces us to two of King’s most prominent themes: small Maine towns with dark underbellies, and main characters written with care and empathy despite being deeply flawed and morally gray - in this case Carrie, her mother, and her bully Sue. The story of a troubled girl who develops powers of telekinesis, Carrie is the ultimate “high school is hell” morality tale. Meanwhile, Tabitha is a respected author in her own right, as are both of their sons, Joe Hill and Owen King.Ĭarrie, which King sold for a $2,500 advance, would go on to earn $400,000 for the rights to its paperback run. He frequently and effusively blurbs books from established as well as new authors, citing a clear wish to leave publishing better than he found it. Ever since, King has continued to pay Tabitha’s encouragement forward. She retrieved them and ordered him to keep working on the idea. Tabitha was also the one who discovered draft pages of what would become Carrie tossed in Stephen’s trash can. Tabitha, who’d been one of the first to read Stephen’s short stories in colleges, had loaned Stephen her own typewriter and refused to let him take a higher-paying job that would mean less time to write. King wrote numerous short stories, some of which were published by Playboy and other men’s magazines, but significant writerly success eluded him. He had married Tabitha in 1971, and the pair lived in a trailer in Hampden, Maine, and each worked additional jobs to make ends meet. It was there, in 1969, that he met his wife, Tabitha.īy 1973, King was a high school English teacher drawing a meager $6,400 a year. A lifelong fan of speculative fiction, King began writing seriously while attending the University of Maine Orono. King might have remained a struggling English teacher, but for two women: Tabitha King and Carrie White High school is hell.īorn in 1947, King grew up poor in Durham, Maine, the younger son of a single working mother whose husband, a merchant mariner, abandoned his family when King was still a toddler. King has effectively been translating America’s private, communal, and cultural fears and serving them up to us on grisly platters for half a century. This is but a sampling born from a staggeringly prolific writing career that’s well on its way to spanning five decades. Bernard, or Kathy Bates’s pitch-perfect stalker fan in Misery. Without King, we wouldn’t have one of the most iconic and recognizable images in cinema history - Andy Dufresne standing in the rain after escaping from Shawshank prison - nor would we have the enduring horror of Pennywise the Clown, Cujo the slavering St. Without Carrie, we wouldn’t have the single defining image of the horror of high school: a vat of pig’s blood being dropped on an unsuspecting prom queen. ![]() Without The Shining, and Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece film adaptation, “Here’s Johnny!” would be a dead talk show catchphrase and parodies like the Simpsons’ annual Treehouse of Horror would be bereft of much of their material. That means if you’re a King fan - or looking to become one - there’s no better time to rediscover why he’s such a beloved cultural phenomenon.Īfter all, without King, we wouldn’t have modern works like Stranger Things, whose adolescent ensemble directly channels the Losers’ Club, King’s ensemble of geeky preteen friends from It. In fact, we’ve been enjoying a cultural resurgence of quality King horror adaptations lately, from small-screen adaptations like Gerald’s Game and Castle Rock to the upcoming remake of Pet Sematary, the first trailer for which looks like a promising continuation of the trend. #GOOD SHORT STORIES TO WRITE CULTURAL ANALYSIS ON MOVIE#He now has more than 70 published books, many of which have become cultural icons, and his achievements extend so far beyond a single genre at this point that it’s impossible to limit him to one - even though, as the world was reminded last year when the feature film adaptation of It became the highest-grossing horror movie on record, horror is still King’s calling card. To date, he is the only author in history to have had more than 30 books become No. For the past four decades, no single writer has dominated the landscape of genre writing like him. ![]() It’s nearly impossible to overstate how influential Stephen King is. ![]()
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