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I suspect
that every book publisher or a newspaper editor receives a large volume
of mail from disappointed contributors whose last "piece" has
been brusquely turned down.
It is quite possible that faced with repeated failures and disappointments, an otherwise talented writer who could do with a turn of dame luck, will decide to throw in the towel and go instead into the hay-and-corn or export-import business. Many a tremendous best-seller has literally gone abegging before a lucky publisher decided to take a chance. Vita Delmar’s Bad Girl was rejected by 11 publishing houses before Harcourt, Brace picked it up and with what success! Mika Waltari’s The Egyptians made the futile rounds of publishers’ offices for months. Blasco-Ibanex’s The four horsemen of the apocalypse and Emil Ludwig’s Napolean (incidentally, considered an all-time classic) were rejected by so many editors that the dejected authors sold away all the North American publishing rights for a few thousand dollars apiece. In his delightful autobiography, Sir Geoffrey Faber, a co-founder of the distinguished house of Faber and Faber confesses to one of the worst instances of wrong guessing on record. "An agent offered Mr Pearl Buck’s Good Earth, "he writes," and I turned it down, but you haven’t heard the worst yet. When I sent back the book, it was rejected in turn by a dozen of my competitors, but the agent still had dogged faith in it and he bagged me to re-consider it and I turned him down a second time!" Bad timing has killed more than one book that could have been a rousing success with more adroit handling. One of the first victims of a publisher’s failure to accurately gauge current public interest was none other than Henry David Thoreau. In his Journal, Thoreau laments that his A week on the Concorde and Merrimack Rivers (now generally considered an American classic) was published in 1849 when the entire American nation could think of nothing else except the Gold Rush in California. Who wanted a book on the familiar New England during exciting times like these?" "The edition was limited to one thousand copies, "Wrote Thoreau sadly," and eventually I had to buy most of them myself. I now have a complete library of over ten thousand books most of which I wrote myself!" Not all master-pieces have been conceived and written in the luxury of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York or the scenic setting of the French Riviera. John Steinbeck, for
instance, wrote and finished his first novel The Cup of Gold
while working as a night watchman on an estate in the California
mountains. Frank Yerby, whose Foxes of Harrow was on the
best-seller list for a solid year wrote most of it while serving as a
porter in an aircraft factory. William Faulkner wrote The Sanctuary
while working as a clerk in an Oxford, Mississippi post office. Joel
Sayre, author of Rickety Rax and Persian Gulf Command did
his first writing while serving in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in
Siberia in 1919.
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