A young lecturer walked into the classroom and gave the students a quizzical look. Then he asked, “Can somebody living in a caravan with his wife and two children, without having even a manual typewriter or a telephone become a world famous novelist?”
“Impossible!” All the students chorused in unison.
The lecturer gave a knowing look and said, “Then you should read how Stephen King became a legend in his lifetime by writing about 70 novels and becoming a best-selling novelist.”
Stephen King was born in 1947 and grew up in Durham, Maine. He was the younger son of a single working mother whose husband, a merchant mariner, abandoned his family when King was still a toddler. After his secondary education he found a job in a laundry which paid him $1.60 an hour.
In 1973 he became a high school English teacher drawing a meagre $6,400 a year. Then he attended the University of Maine, Orono where he met Tabitha (Tabby) who became his wife. They lived in a caravan in Hampden, Maine. Both of them had to do additional jobs as they had to maintain two children.
Creative writing
King had a great ambition to become a novelist. Whenever he met his friends he told them that he was writing a novel. As he was teaching creative writing, everybody believed him. Tabby who realized her husband’s dream gave him her manual typewriter to write his novel. But he could not afford to buy a telephone. He found that writing was a lonely job. He knew that there were novelists who did not get a break until they were 50 or 60. However, Tabby always encouraged him to write a novel.
When he started writing his maiden novel – ‘Carrie’ – he found it difficult to complete it because it was an all-girl cast. Out of frustration, he threw the manuscript into a dustbin. When he returned from school on the following day, he found to his surprise that Tabby had collected the pages from the dustbin, shaken the cigarette ashes off the crumpled balls of paper and smoothed them out. Then he sat down to complete the manuscript of “Carrie.”
Tabby asked him to go ahead with the novel and wanted to know the rest of the story. He told her that he knew nothing about secondary schoolgirls. Tabby then agreed to help him with it. After four months of hard work, King completed the manuscript and sent it to a book publisher – Doubleday – where he had a friend - William Thompson.
One day while he was in the teachers’ room marking answer papers, he received a call from Colleen Sites to come and see her. She told him that there was a phone call from his wife. She had called from a neighbour’s phone as she did not have a telephone. King thought that one of their children might have fallen and broken a leg. When he contacted his wife, Tabby read out a telegram sent by Bill Thompson. It read, “Congratulations! ‘Carrie’ has been accepted as a Doubleday book. Is $2,500 advance OK? The future lies ahead. Love! Bill.”
A small fish
‘Carrie’ was published in 1974. However, King felt he was a small fish in a very busy river because Doubleday was an enormous fiction mill. It published science fiction, yarns, romances and Westerns at a rate 50 or more a month. Even in Sri Lanka there is a publisher in Colombo who publishes 50 or more books at a time. He says he prints only about 250 copies of each book. Very rarely does he disappoint a writer who comes to him with a manuscript.
More than King, Tabby was excited to read the maiden novel. She asked him whether he could quit teaching to become a full-time writer. However, King did not want to do so as he had a wife and two children to support. On the other hand, he was also not sure whether he could survive as a writer. The situation is somewhat similar in Sri Lanka. Most of our writers are employed and they do writing as a part-time job.
Tabby kept on asking how much he could make if Doubleday was able to sell paperback reprints rights to “Carrie.” He knew that Mario Puzo had received an advance of $400,000 for “The Godfather.” He casually told her that he could get only about $30,000 if he sold ‘Carrie’ for a paperback.
Second coming
With the advance of $2,500 he bought a new car and signed a teaching contract for the 1973-74 academic year. Then he started writing his second novel which was a combination of ‘Payton Place’ and ‘Dracula’. He titled it ‘Second Coming’. As there was a little improvement in his income, they moved into a ground-floor apartment in Bangor. Only then did he get a phone.
One day when he was alone at home he received a call from Bill Thompson who said, “The paperback rights to ‘Carrie’ went to Signet Books for $400,000.” King was completely speechless. He asked Bill, “Did you say it went for $40,000?” Bill said, “Four-hundred thousand dollars. Under the rules of the contract, you would get $200,000. Congratulations!”
King wondered for a moment. He was paying $90 a month as rent but this man he had met only once is telling him that he had won a lottery. King asked Bill again, “Are you sure?” Bill said, “Yes” emphatically. He said the number was four followed by five zeros. After that a decimal point and two more zeros.” When Tabby returned home, he broke the news. She looked over his shoulder at their shabby little four-room flat and began to cry.
Defining image
Without ‘Carrie’ we would not have the single defining image of the horror of high school. Without King, we would not have one of the most iconic and recognizable images in cinema history. ‘Carrie’ is the ultimate ‘high school is hell’ morality tale. In the novel, Carrie faces ruthless abuse from her religious mother and bullying from high school classmates. The novel introduces to the reader two of King’s most prominent themes: Small main towns with dark underbellies, and main characters written with care and empathy.
Today Stephen King is perhaps the only author in history to have had more than 30 books become No.1 best-sellers. He has published 70 books, many of which have become cultural icons.