“In 1955 Laurence Wylie, Harvard’s esteemed professor of French civilization, sent the manuscript of a sensitive chronicle of French country life, A Village in the Vaucluse, to Knopf. Back it came with a letter of rejection which said, ‘It is so far from being a book for the general reader that nothing can be done about it.’ Wylie did nothing ‘about’ it–he sent it on to the Harvard University Press, which published it in the next year. It became and has remained an extremely popular book for the general reader and the scholar alike.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
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