Stephen King's Carrie Was Rejected 30 Times
Quick answer: Stephen King's Carrie was rejected 30 times before Doubleday said yes. The true story of the trash can, Tabitha King, and the $400,000 paperback call.
In the early 1970s Stephen King was teaching English at Hampden Academy in Maine for a salary widely reported as around $6,400 a year. He and his wife Tabitha lived in a rented doublewide trailer with two small children, and he wrote at night on a portable typewriter balanced on a child's desk in the laundry room. He had sold a handful of short stories to men's magazines for cheque amounts that barely covered the antibiotics his kids needed. Several full novels sat unsold in a drawer. By any sensible measure, the writing was not working.
Then he started a story about a bullied teenage girl named Carrie White, a school locker room, and a shower of taunts that wakes something telekinetic in her. He wrote a few pages, decided he did not understand teenage girls, did not like the character, and could not see a market for it. So he crumpled the pages and dropped them in the kitchen wastebasket. That should have been the end of it. It was very nearly the end of one of the most famous debuts in publishing history.
The pages in the wastebasket
The next evening Tabitha King found the discarded pages while emptying the bin, smoothed them out, shook off the cigarette ash, and read them. Her verdict, as King has told the story many times since, was simple: he had something here, and he should keep going. She also offered practical help. He did not know how girls' locker rooms worked or how teenage girls actually talked to each other, and she did. That combination of encouragement and concrete correction is rarer and more useful than either one alone.
King kept going, partly, he has admitted, because he trusted her judgement more than his own mood. The finished manuscript was short for a novel, padded out with fictional news clippings, court transcripts and book excerpts, a scrapbook structure he chose partly to reach a publishable length. What began as a salvage job became the book's signature: the documentary fragments make the small-town catastrophe feel reported rather than invented.
The spike on the wall
The rejection habit started long before Carrie. In his memoir 'On Writing', King describes submitting stories to magazines from the age of fourteen and hammering a nail into his bedroom wall to hold the rejection slips. By the time he was sixteen, the slips had grown too heavy for the nail, so he replaced the nail with a spike and kept writing. It is one of the most quoted images in modern writing advice for a reason. He did not frame each rejection as a verdict on his talent. He framed the growing pile as evidence that he was doing the work.
Some of those slips carried handwritten notes, and King learned to read them as coaching rather than consolation. One early note advising him to cut his drafts by ten percent stayed with him for decades and shows up in his revision advice to this day. A rejection with a sentence of feedback attached is not a closed door. It is an editor, unpaid and unasked, telling you where the door actually is.
Thirty rejections, then a telegram
The figure attached to Carrie in countless retellings is thirty rejections before acceptance. The number is widely reported rather than documented line by line, and King's own accounts focus less on the count than on the grind of those years, but the shape of the story is not in dispute: the manuscript went out repeatedly, came back repeatedly, and the family finances stayed desperate throughout. King has also said that publishers of the era doubted paperback horror by an unknown could sell at all, which tells you the rejections were about the market as much as the manuscript.
The yes came from Bill Thompson, an editor at Doubleday who had already rejected earlier King novels but kept asking to see the next one. That detail matters. Thompson was not a stranger struck by lightning; he was a professional who had been tracking a writer through several near misses. In the spring of 1973, Doubleday accepted Carrie with an advance of $2,500, modest even by the standards of the time. Because the Kings had no telephone, an expense they had cut, the news arrived by telegram.
The Mother's Day phone call
The advance kept the lights on, but the life-changing moment came a few months later, on Mother's Day 1973. Thompson called to tell King that New American Library had bought the paperback rights to Carrie for $400,000, of which King's contractual share was half. He has described being so stunned that he could barely stand, and going out to buy Tabitha a hair dryer because it was the only gift he could think of. At the end of the school year he left teaching and never went back.
Carrie was published in hardback in April 1974 with unremarkable sales, then found its real audience in paperback, selling over a million copies within a year of the paperback release, a figure widely reported at the time. Brian De Palma's 1976 film adaptation pushed it further. The book that its own author had thrown away became the foundation of one of the most productive careers in popular fiction.
Why it actually turned
Strip the legend away and the turn rests on four things, none of them mystical. First, a reader he trusted told him the truth at the exact moment his own judgement failed, and he listened. Second, he finished the draft anyway, even while doubting it, which is the step most abandoned books never reach. Third, an editor who had said no before kept the relationship open, and King kept sending work into it. Fourth, luck: a paperback market suddenly hungry for horror. King has never pretended otherwise, and the honest accounting is part of why the story wears well.
Notice what is missing from that list: confidence. King did not believe in Carrie. He believed in the routine of writing and submitting, and he had a household culture, built with Tabitha, in which giving up on a draft was a decision you had to defend rather than a default you drifted into. Systems saved that book. Feelings nearly killed it.
What a working writer can take from this
Your opinion of your own work in mid-draft is the least reliable measurement you own. King's despair three pages into Carrie was sincere and completely wrong. The practical lesson is not to feel better about your drafts; it is to make quitting harder than continuing. Show the abandoned thing to one honest reader before you bury it. Keep a submissions log so a no becomes a data point instead of a wound. Treat any editor who says no with a note as a future colleague, and send them the next piece.
There is also a quieter lesson about material. King thought he could not write Carrie because he did not know the world of teenage girls. He wrote it by asking someone who did. Not knowing is a research problem, not a disqualification. The same holds for a poet writing outside their own life: the gap between you and the subject is bridgeable with attention and honest questions, and contest judges reading for emotion and authenticity can tell when that work has been done. If you have a finished piece gathering dust, put it in front of readers; Writory's monthly contest reads and scores every single entry between the 1st and the 25th, so no poem is met with silence.
What poets can take from this
- Never bin a draft the same day you lose faith in it; give it one trusted reader first.
- Keep a simple submissions log so rejections become records, not injuries.
- When an editor rejects you with a personal note, send them your next piece within the year.
- Treat gaps in your knowledge as research tasks; ask someone who lives inside the world you are writing about.
- Set a rule that finishing is the default and abandoning requires a stated reason.
- Reread your own early rejections once a year; the pile is proof of practice, not failure.
Try it yourself
Write a poem or short piece that begins with something retrieved from a bin: a letter, a photograph, a crumpled page. Let the poem discover why it was thrown away, and why it deserved to be saved.
Questions
How many times was Carrie by Stephen King rejected?
The widely reported figure is thirty rejections before Doubleday accepted it in 1973. The exact count is repeated in many retellings rather than documented submission by submission, but King's own accounts confirm the manuscript was rejected many times while he worked as a schoolteacher.
Did Stephen King really throw Carrie in the trash?
Yes, by his own account. He wrote the opening pages, decided the story was not working, and put them in the kitchen wastebasket. His wife Tabitha King retrieved them, told him to continue, and helped him with details about the lives of teenage girls.
How much did Stephen King earn from Carrie?
Doubleday paid a $2,500 hardback advance in 1973. The transformative money came when New American Library bought the paperback rights for $400,000, of which King's share was $200,000, enough for him to leave teaching and write full time.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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