Famous Novels Rejection Letters Part 2

You've been wanting it and I heard your call. Here's the next round of rejection letters that made editors cry afterwards:

Carrie by Stephen King

It's an eerie tale of vengeance that marked a generation of young thrill seekers, thanks to the demented interpretation by Sissy Spacek. And yet...

We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.

The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Mrs. Le Guin is a groundbreaking artist, who brought feminists ideas to science-fiction. The Left Hand Of Darkness won the Nebula Award in 1969 and the Hugo in 1970, which is pretty much the be-all end-all of science-fiction honors. And yet(this is a good one)...

Dear Miss Kidd,

Ursula K. Le Guin writes extremely well, but I'm sorry to have to say that on the basis of that one highly distinguishing quality alone I cannot make you an offer for the novel. The book is so endlessly complicated by details of reference and information, the interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the very action of the story seems to be to become hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually, unreadable. The whole is so dry and airless, so lacking in pace, that whatever drama and excitement the novel might have had is entirely dissipated by what does seem, a great deal of the time, to be extraneous material. My thanks nonetheless for having thought of us. The manuscript of The Left Hand of Darkness is returned herewith. Yours sincerely,

The Editor

21 June, 1968

Lust For Life by Irving Stone


Lust For Life sold 25 million copies and was adapted for cinema, starring Kirk Douglas...and won an Oscar.And yet it was refused sixteen times...for reasons like this....

It is a long, dull novel about an artist...

Here's one that will pump up people that have been dealing with constant rejection for a long time. Did you know that revered poet Emily Dickinson only published seven poems during her lifetime? She touched the lives of millions of people and inspired several hundred poets...after she died. Here's a smartass rejection letter she got during her lifetime by an editor who obviously didn't believe that poetry could be redefined: "Your poems are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties and are generally devoid of true poetical qualities."

The Deer Park by Norman Mailer

This is an example of a writer that was ahead of his time. The Deer Park was an incendiary novel for its time and it made a lot of people look at their shoes, mumbling. Including this editor (to give him his due, he understood the power of Mailer's novel)....

This will set publishing back 25 years


and now...to finish in beauty...

The Torrents Of Spring by Ernest Hemingway

This novel was written to get rejected. Hemingway wrote it to get away from a contract with a publisher and guess what? It worked...

It would be extremely rotten taste, to say nothing of being horribly cruel, should we want to publish it.



So, my dear fellow writers...keep smiling! And more important yet...KEEP WRITING!