Famous Book Rejections

Here are a few book rejections I'd bet the editors would like to take back...

The Princess Diaries, by Meg Cabot, slipped through the hands of 17 publishers before being accepted for publication.

Tony Hillerman, now famous for his Navajo Tribal Police mystery novels, was initially told to "Get rid of all that Indian stuff."

William Faulkner's book, Sanctuary, elicited the following comment. "Good God, I can't publish this!"

John Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, was rejected by a dozen publishers and 16 agents before finding a home.

One editor's rejection letter to Rudyard Kipling said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language."

Gone With the Wind  was rejected 38 times.

To Stephen King on Carrie... "We're not interested in science fiction that deals with negative utopias. They do not sell."

To Irving Stone on Lust for Life..."A long dull novel about an artist." (After 16 rejections, Stone found a publisher and the novel sold twenty-five million copies.)

On The Diary of Anne Frank... "The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the 'curiosity' level."

To Anita Loos on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes... "Do you realize, young lady, that you're the first American writer to poke fun at sex?"

To J.G. Ballard on Crash... "The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help."

Mystery writer Mary Higgins Clark received a $60 million plus advance for five books. But when she was trying to sell Journey Back to Love in the 1960s, one rejection letter stated, "We found the heroine as boring as her husband did."

Dr. Seuss received the following: "...too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling."

Only seven of Emily Dickinson's poems were published during her lifetime. One rejection said, "Your poems are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauty and are generally devoid of true poetical qualities."

The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemmingway elicited the following rejection: "It would be extremely rotten taste, to say nothing of being horrible cruel, should we want to publish it."

Of Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, one editor said, "I haven't really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say... Apparently the author intends it to be funny--possibly even satire--but it is really not funny on any intellectual level... From your long publishing experience you will know that it is less disastrous to turn down a work of genius than to turn down talented mediocrities."

On Jacqueline Susanne's Valley of the Dolls: "She is a painfully dull, inept, clumsy, undisciplined, rambling and thoroughly amateurish writer whose every sentence, paragraph and scene cries for the hand of a pro."