Before his fame, Stephen Edwin King worked as a Maine school janitor and laundry labourer; a girls' locker room helped inspire his novel, Carrie

Way before Stephen Edwin King became a renowned author in the horror genre, he had to support his living through a series of odd jobs in Maine. At Brunswick High School, he worked as a janitor and was once assigned to clean the girls’ shower room. Years later, while financially struggling and working at an industrial laundry, King revisited the memory of that unfamiliar setting while developing an idea about an isolated teen girl experiencing her first period. Eventually, this scene became the opening sequence of Carrie, his first published novel.Stephen King reportedly grew up experiencing financial difficulties. His parents, Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King, separated when he was still young. Following their separation, Stephen and his older brother David were raised by their mother. At an early age, King had allegedly developed an interest in writing, with his first professional short story, The Glass Floor, being published in 1967 in Starling Mystery Stories. He later attended the University of Maine at Orono, where he studied English and contributed to the student newspaper.The journey from a school janitor to an industrial laundry workerDuring one summer while attending college, Stephen King took a janitorial job at the school. In his memoir, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, the writer shared that he was assigned to scrub rust stains from the walls of the girls’ shower room alongside another worker. He remembered seeing two metal boxes mounted on the wall, which he subsequently learned contained tampons. King noted in his memoir that he had never experienced such an environment, and the details of that encounter stayed with him for a long time.This experience later gained relevance when King started imagining a story about a teenage girl facing humiliation at school. However, this incident did not immediately make its way into the novel. Stephen King continued his education and graduated from the University of Maine in 1970. He graduated with a degree in English and qualifications to teach at the high school level.After his graduation, King initially struggled to find a teaching position. He got married to Tabitha in January 1971. The couple relied on King’s earnings from the industrial laundry where he worked as a labourer. In addition to that, they also relied on Tabitha’s student loan, savings and King’s occasional payments from his short-story sales. At the industrial laundry, his responsibilities involved handling large quantities of commercial linen, such as motel sheets, restaurant tablecloths and hospital garments. Stephen continued writing whenever he could manage a little time, sometimes even finding time in between lunch breaks.In the autumn of 1971, King secured an English teaching job at Hampden Academy in Maine. This position offered a more stable source of income. However, it did not immediately end the family’s financial challenges, and King continued writing after his shift at school and returned to the industrial laundry for summer work. In an interview with Yankee Magazine in 1979, he recalled that he was working at the laundry during the summer when he started writing Carrie.How the locker-room memory became a part of CarrieAround 1972, King began cultivating an idea about an unpopular teenage girl whose classmates humiliated her after she experienced her first period in a school shower. The scene drew directly on the memory of the girls’ shower room at Brunswick High School. In his memoir, the writer noted that he had struggled to write convincingly from the point of view of a young girl and was not comfortable enough with the setting and the characters. Eventually, he decided to discard the opening pages as he believed that the idea was not panning out the way he wanted it to.Tabitha found those discarded pages and read them. She reportedly encouraged him to continue, and her persuasion prompted him to return to the manuscript. Interestingly, the locker room incident was not the sole influence behind the central character. On his official website, the author describes Carrie White as a composite of two girls he had known during his school years. Therefore, the two girls influenced the character herself, while the locker room experience set up a backdrop for the opening humiliation.King’s financial circumstances took a turn after CarrieKing continued teaching at Hampden Academy while developing the story. He eventually completed the manuscript and submitted it to Doubleday. In the spring of 1973, the publisher accepted the story, with King receiving a hardcover advance of $2,500. While the news initially provided some financial relief, the development that transformed his circumstances came when the paperback rights were sold to Signet Books for $400,000.The paperback deal thus gave King the financial security to leave his job as a teacher and concentrate full-time on writing. Published in 1974, Carrie became King’s first published novel, and its success helped him establish a career in writing. He eventually published titles including The Shining, The Stand and It.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.