s own mark as a writer. While still a student at the local high school, he tried his hand at composing offbeat short stories. He never sold a single one, but he did win first prize in an essay competition sponsored by a scholastic magazine. He took time off from his studies to play on the varsity football team, and was, for several years, the rhythm guitarist in an amateur rock ‘n’ roll band called the MoonSpinners. After he graduated from high school, King attended the University of Maine at Orono on a scholarship. Majoring in English, he took creative writing courses and contributed a weekly column called “The Garbage Truck” to the campus newspaper. By the time he had obtained his B.S. degree in 1970, he had sold two stories – “The Glass Floor” and “The Reaper’s Image” – to Startling Mystery Stories for $35 each. Over the next few years, he published short stories in Cavalier, Gent, Penthouse, and Cosmopolitan, but he earned so little money as an author, that he was forced to add to his income by working at such jobs as janitor, library aide, gas station attendant, and presser in an industrial laundry. Discouraged and dejected by his mounting pile of rejection slips, King almost scrapped the manuscript of what was to become his first published novel, Carrie. Luckily, his wife retrieved the discarded pages from the trash and encouraged him to complete the book and submit it to Bill Thompson, an editor at Doubleday & Company, Inc., who had shown an interest in his work in the past. Most critics dismissed Carrie as gory and overdone, but horror buffs snapped it up. Total sales of the book eventually topped the 4,000,000 mark and the film version, became one of the top-grossing films of 1976. King cheerfully admits that ”the movie made the book and the book made me.” Over the next several years, Doubleday published four more horror ...
