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Sunday, August 19, 2007

More Publishing Crimes

What rejecting editors told the great ones:*

John Dos Passos: "I am rather offended."
Gustave Flaubert: "Utterly superfluous."
F. Scott Fitzgerald: "Does not culminate in anything."
Radclyffe Hall: "Will be regarded as propaganda."
Thomas Hardy: "Too abominable to be tolerated."
James Joyce: "Rather discursive and the point of view is not an attractive one."
Sherwood Anderson: "Far too gloomy."
Mary Higgins Clark: "We found the heroine as boring as her husband had."
Ayn Rand: "Unsaleable and unpublishable."

*From Rotten Rejections, edited by Andre Bernard (Pushcart Press, 1990)

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