Carrie Study Guide

King was born in Portland, Maine on September 21, 1947. Like the protagonist of his first novel (Carrie), King was raised by a single mother after his father left when King was still a toddler. He was an incredibly voracious reader from a young age and later attended the University of Maine at Orono, earning a bachelor’s degree in English. It was there that he met his future wife, Tabitha Spruce. The couple had their first child in 1970 and married in 1971. For some time after graduation, King worked as a teacher while selling short stories. King almost threw the manuscript of his first novel, Carrie, away, but his wife convinced him to keep it. Carrie was published in 1974 and sold fantastically, opening a path for King to become a successful author and eventually become known as the “King of Horror.” King went on to become a notably prolific writer who has published dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, many of which have received film and stage adaptations. King has three children and currently splits his time between residences in Maine and Florida.

Although Carrie is primarily focused on the catastrophe that befalls a small, relatively isolated town, the plot and themes of the story reflect the historical events that King was living through when he wrote the novel. The event with the most direct link to Carrie’s plot is the Watergate scandal, which occurred from 1972 to 1974 and greatly shattered many Americans’ trust in governmental institutions. This distrust is reflected in Carrie through the White Commission, a government investigation into prom night that ultimately fails to develop any successful measures to prevent another catastrophe like what happened in Chamberlain. More broadly, the larger arc of Carrie’s plot—an idyllic American town that is ultimately destroyed by immense violence of its own making—reflects various political instabilities of the era in which King wrote the novel, such as the Vietnam War and the threat of nuclear annihilation, which compromised people’s ingrained ideas of American exceptionalism and safety.

Six years after Carrie’s publication, King published Firestarter, which shares many of Carrie’s plot points and themes. In Firestarter, the protagonist, Charlie, has the power of pyrokinesis, which ultimately leads to her unleashing a massive catastrophe as a result of immense psychological strain. In addition to King’s own work, Carrie has been transformed by other authors. One recent example is Tiffany D. Jackson’s 2022 novel The Weight of Blood, which reimagines Carrie as a biracial Black girl who is forced to pass as white by her abusive white supremacist father while living in a former sundown town in Georgia. While King’s original novel emphasizes the struggle of adolescent girlhood, Jackson’s version compounds this struggle by depicting the psychological impact of growing up Black in a deeply racist community.