Stephen King: A laundry worker whose first novel was pulled from the bin
He washed hotel linen and taught English while collecting rejection slips on a nail. He threw away the opening of Carrie; his wife took it out of the bin.
Rejection slips on a nail
Stephen King was born in 1947 in Portland, Maine. As a teenager he sent stories to magazines and pinned the rejection slips on a nail in his bedroom wall until the nail could not hold them.
Laundry and teaching
After university he worked in an industrial laundry washing hotel sheets and hospital linen, then as an English teacher at a school in Hampden, Maine. He and his wife Tabitha lived in a rented trailer and he wrote in the evenings in a tiny laundry room.
Into the bin
He began a story about a bullied girl, did not like the first pages and threw them away. Tabitha took them out of the bin, read them and told him to finish it.
What came of it
Carrie was published in 1974. He has written dozens of books since, and wrote about those early years in On Writing (2000).
He kept writing around full time jobs and kept every rejection as proof he was trying. Sometimes the person next to you can see value in your work that you cannot.
Where the facts come from: Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000).
