Carrie.

KING, Stephen.

$9,800.00

Item Number: 144855

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1974.

First edition, first printing of the novel that launched King’s career, with ‘First Edition’ stated on the copyright page and ‘P6’ in the gutter of page 199. Octavo, original maroon cloth. Presentation copy, boldly inscribed by the author on the second endpaper, “For L. Jack Powell – with best wishes, Stephen King 11/7/80.” Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design and author photograph by Alex Gotfryd. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. A superior example.

Carrie inaugurated King’s reign as “the best-selling American author during the final quarter of the 20th century” (Chronology of American Literature). When King began writing the book, however, he was living in a trailer and working at a laundromat for $60 a week. “Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together… I did three single-spaced pages of a first draft, then crumpled them up in disgust and threw them away… [The next night, my wife] Tabby had the pages… ‘You’ve got something here,’ she said. ‘I really think you do” (King, On Writing, 67-68). Tabitha King was right. “Life in the trailer ended in 1973 when Doubleday bought Carrie for a $2500 advance. Hardcover sales were not spectacular, but the paperback sales-boosted by the [1976] film of the novel-were nearly 4,000,000 copies. ‘The movie made the book, and the book made me,’ King says” (New York Times).