“Peyton Place, that ersatz Desire Under the Elms, a mish-mash of small-town sext steamy enought to tempt, you would think, all profit-minded publishers (and what other kind, you might ask, is there?) was turned down by fourteen of them. A work as different from Peyton Place as can imagined, William Appelman Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, was rejected by more than twenty publishers before it was finally accepted. It has now been reprinted several times and is recognized as an outstanding revisionist work. Jonathan Livingston Seagull also flew through some twenty rejections.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Mark's Text Terminal 