On the Absurdity of Rejection

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How do you follow up an article announcing the death of a legend? (Not to mention a personal hero?) It definitely derails one's train of thought and calls into question the triviality of one's ideas, that's for sure.

Ms. L'Engle's Time Quintet series is nothing short of a masterpiece, its brilliance permeating dimensions, from the vastness of space to the smallest of organelles. To consider that it was ever rejected by a publishing house now seems perfectly absurd -- and yet, its first volume (A Wrinkle in Time) saw years of trying and near-failure, rejected by no less than forty publishers before finding a home with Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

So on a related note, here's a short and interesting weekend read that's simultaneously funny and utterly depressing: yesterday The NY Times published an essay examining some of the more egregious rejection blunders of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., one of the more respectable and influential publishing houses of our time. In it, author David Oshinsky cracks open the Knopf records vault at the University of Texas at Austin and starts digging for gems. It might seem like the publishers behind seventeen Nobel Prize-winners might be above rejecting George Orwell on the basis of Americans being not that into "animal stories," but hey -- everyone is equally prone to making the kind of mistakes that make you want to bang your head on your desk repeatedly. Some just make you bang your head on your desk more than others.

The rejection files, which run from the 1940s through the 1970s, include dismissive verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges (“utterly untranslatable”), Isaac Bashevis Singer (“It’s Poland and the rich Jews again”), Anaďs Nin (“There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic”), Sylvia Plath (“There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice”) and Jack Kerouac (“His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so”).

The Kerouac one in particular pains me. Oshinsky goes on to examine Knopf's taste for rejecting novels and research of a historical nature, often for lack of wanting to take a chance on possibly not being able to recoup publication costs. Historical classic The Age of the Democratic Revolution was one; The Diary of Anne Frank, another. Oops.

He also touches on the declining art of the rejection letter -- in his prime, Knopf was apt to use some exciting words the likes of which our culture has pretty much eschewed these days in our veer toward the overly polite.

Today, as publishers eschew the finished manuscript and spit out contracts based on a sketchy outline or even less, the scripting of rejection letters has become something of a lost art. It’s hard to imagine a current publisher dictating the sort of response that Alfred Knopf sent to a prominent Columbia University historian in the 1950s. “This time there’s no point in trying to be kind,” it said. “Your manuscript is utterly hopeless as a candidate for our list. I never thought the subject worth a damn to begin with and I don’t think it’s worth a damn now. Lay off, MacDuff.”

Awesome.

Having been on both sides, the whole publishing process is a decidedly tough thing. On the one hand, rejections can be (at least temporarily) crippling to even the thicker-skinned sort; on the other hand, who knows what poor intern was slogging through several books a week, perhaps skimming out based on bad grammar or a somewhat-lacking sense of personal taste. Overall, it leaves me with a pang of guilt, so I leave you with this: would-be Madeleine L'Engles of the world, if as a lowly reader-report intern I recommended your rejection, I'm truly sorry. I hope you persevere with your manuscripts, and if they truly are great, then I hope they do well. But know this -- no matter what, those reader reports were written with flare. Knopf, wherever you are -- you big, blundering fool of a pioneer, I salute you.



_DictionaryGirl_ was pretty much the best reader-report-writing intern in the publishing world ever. Also, go get The Time Quintet! Forty rejections is nothing. One success is everything.

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