25 Rejection Letters to Famous Authors

I’ve mentioned before that to be a writer is to be rejected, but how have famous authors really been treated by the publishing industry? I’ve tracked down several excerpts from rejection letters to well-known authors and shared them below. Some of them are hysterical. Others are horrifying. But all of them offer a brief peek into the realm of publishing.

 

Rejection Letter Excerpts

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1. “You’d have a decent book if you’d get rid of that Gatsby Character.” – to F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

2. “Stick to teaching.” – to Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

3. “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.” -to Stephen King, Carrie

4. “I rack my brains why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep.” – to Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

5. “He hasn’t got any future.” – about John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

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6. “My dear sir, I have read your manuscript. Oh, my dear sir.” – to Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan

7. “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.”– about J.G. Ballard, Crash.

8. “…for your own sake do not publish this book.” – to D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly’s Lover

9. “If I may be frank — you certainly are in your prose — I found your efforts to be both tedious and offensive. You really are a man’s man, aren’t you? I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that you had penned this entire story locked up at the club, ink in one hand, brandy in the other.” – to Ernest Hemmingway, The Sun also Rises

10. “Frenetic and scrambled prose.” – to Jack Kerouac, On the Road

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11. “It is so badly written.” – about Dan Brown, The DaVinci Code

12. “I haven’t the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say. Apparently the author intends it to be funny.” – about Joseph Heller, Catch-22

13. “Our united opinion is entirely against the book. It is very long, and rather old-fashioned… First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale? While this is a rather delightful, if somewhat esoteric, plot device, we recommend an antagonist with a more popular visage among the younger readers. For instance, could not the Captain be struggling with a depravity towards young, perhaps voluptuous, maidens?” – to Hermann Melville, Moby Dick

14. “We feel that we don’t know the central character well enough.” – to J.D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye

15. “I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” – about Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

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16. “Unsaleable and unpublishable.” – to Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

17. “Undisciplined, rambling and thoroughly amateurish writer.” – about Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls

18. “Too radical of a departure from traditional juvenile literature.” – about L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz

19. “An endless nightmare. I think the verdict would be ‘Oh don’t read that horrid book.’” about H.G. Wells, The War Of The Worlds

20. “It is not interesting enough for the general reader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader.” – to H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

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21. “The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.” – about Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank

22. “I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your M.S. three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.” – to Gertrude Stein

23. “An irresponsible holiday story that will never sell.” to Kenneth Grahame, The Wind In The Willows

24. “An absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.” – to William Golding, The Lord of the Flies

25. “Good God, I can’t publish this.” – about William Faulkner, Sanctuary

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Hopefully reading about how authors have struggled and survived the rejection process will make you feel a bit better about your own path to publishing. If you know of any other interesting rejection letters or feel brave enough to describe rejections of your own, feel free to share them here. Seeing a spectrum of rejections helps us all be a better writing community, and frankly, I doubt any of us will receive rejections as vehement as the ones above. (Though I may start saying, “My dear sir. Oh, my dear sir,” to people who bother me.)

 

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Attributions:

(I must admit that I don’t have perfect provenance for each of the above excerpts, so if you spot anything egregiously inaccurate, please let me know.)

Letter from Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, to Robert E. Howard rejecting the first three Conan the Barbarian stories, 1932, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Conan_Rejection_Letter.PNG

http://www.litrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-rejected/

http://mentalfloss.com/uk/books/can-you-identify-these-17-famous-authors-from-their-rejections

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10877825/The-rejection-letters-how-publishers-snubbed-11-great-authors.html

http://susiesmith13.tripod.com/id12.html