A LITERARY HALL OF SHAME
Were These History’s Worst Rejections Of Great Writers?
Why some editors thought Flaubert, Melville, James Baldwin, and Agatha Christie were turkeys
Nothing comforted me more, when I was starting out as a freelancer, than creating a perversely cheering file I labeled “Rejections.”
Into it I put stories of future superstars who’d faced what now look like colossally misguided rebuffs: Oscar-winning actors denied roles, sports heroes cut from teams, billionaires fired from their first jobs.
My favorite stories involved authors rejected by editors who were — I was sure — as boneheaded as those who were rejecting me.
An anecdote I heard at a writers’ conference seemed to sum up the follies in that literary Hall of Shame: An American publisher turned down Animal Farm because, as a panelist recalled it, “animal stories don’t sell in the U.S.”
That anecdote stood out because so much was wrong with it. Animal Farm isn’t an “animal story” but a satire of Stalinism. The publisher rejected it in 1945, and books about…
