Carrie was published by Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York, on 5 April 1974, in a first printing of approximately 30,000 copies priced at $5.95. King was twenty-six, teaching high school English in Hampden, Maine, and living in a trailer. He had thrown the opening pages in the garbage — his wife Tabitha retrieved them and urged him to continue. The paperback rights sold to Signet for $400,000 (of which King received half); the subsequent paperback sold over one million copies in its first year. King never returned to teaching.
The Novel
Carrietta “Carrie” White — sixteen years old, friendless, bullied, and raised by a fanatically religious mother who regards menstruation as sinful — discovers she has telekinetic powers. After being humiliated at the prom (a bucket of pig’s blood dumped on her head by classmates), she uses her powers to destroy the school, kill her tormentors, and devastate the town of Chamberlain, Maine.
The novel is narrated through a collage of documents — newspaper clippings, book excerpts, commission testimony, personal accounts — that frame the events as a known catastrophe being reconstructed after the fact. This technique (borrowed from epistolary fiction and true-crime documentation) gives the novel a documentary authority that intensifies its horror.
King’s insight is that Carrie’s rage is earned — she has been systematically abused by everyone in her life (her mother, her peers, her teachers), and the reader’s sympathy remains with her even as she kills. The novel is simultaneously a horror story and a social critique: a portrait of how cruelty creates monsters.
Collecting Carrie
First edition (1974, Doubleday): Approximately 30,000 copies, priced at $5.95.
Identification points:
- “First Edition” on the copyright page (with Doubleday code “P6” in the gutter)
- Published by Doubleday & Company, Inc.
- Magenta/maroon cloth boards
- “Carrie” embossed on front board
First edition, first printing:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $3,000–$8,000
- Near Fine in jacket: $1,500–$3,000
- Without jacket: $100–$300
Signed copies: King signed copies of Carrie less frequently in the 1970s than in later decades. Signed first editions: $5,000–$12,000.
Value trajectory (2016–2026): Approximately 2× for fine copies in jacket. King’s debut benefits from collector interest in origin points and from the general appreciation of his bibliography.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did King really throw away the manuscript? He threw away the first few pages — unhappy with writing from a teenage girl’s perspective. His wife Tabitha found them in the trash and encouraged him to continue. She provided guidance on the details of female adolescence.
Is this a feminist novel? It can be read as one — Carrie’s telekinesis emerges with puberty, her mother associates female sexuality with sin, and the boys who dump the blood are punished for their casual cruelty toward women. But King has noted that the novel is equally about class: Carrie is poor, unfashionable, and socially invisible.