Since December 2018, Albert (Al) Hanley III has served as division president of the Alexandria, Virginia-based company Transforce Group. Outside work, Al Hanley enjoys Stephen King novels. Carrie, King’s 1974 classic work, and the author’s first, drew inspiration from many sources.
In the early 1970s, King had only experienced minimal success as a writer. Mailing his stories to magazines, the money he made from those short stories supplemented the income he made as a high school teacher. His wife, Tabby, supported King’s aspirations, including letting him use her typewriter.
King drew on three sources when creating the character of Carrie White, the novel’s protagonist. The first was his time working as a high school janitor cleaning rust stains from the girls’ locker room showers, and the strangeness he felt seeing the personal hygiene product machines on the walls. The second was a magazine article he read in late 1972, recounting supposed poltergeist activity stemming from a teenage girl with telekinesis.
The third consists of the life stories of two girls King knew in school, who informed Carrie White’s personality and background. When he discusses these girls, King uses aliases to protect their identities, because neither girl lived to the age of 30. One, whom King calls Tina, came from a low-income household and endured constant bullying. The other, whom he calls Sandra, experienced seizures and lived with her religious, fundamentalist mother.
In 1973, King wrote three pages of Carrie’s first draft before trashing the idea. However, Tabby found them the next day, read them, and liked them. After several weeks of helping King create believable female characters, King completed Carrie’s first draft in nine months. The above experiences combined to create a story that explores the process of women reaching adulthood, and how White and Irving may have reacted, if they had possessed the power to fight back against the bullies in their lives.
