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It is quite possible that, faced with repeated failures and rejections, 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 export-import or hay-and-corn business. Many a bestseller has literally gone abegging before a lucky publisher decided to take a chance on it. Vita Delmar’s Bad Girl was rejected by as many as 11 publishing houses before Harcoyrt, Brace picked it up and with what suxcess ! Mike Waltari’s The Egyptians made the futile rounds of publishing houses for months on end, Blaso Ibanez’s The’ Four Hersemen of the Apocalypse and Emil Ludwig’s Napolean (incidentally considered a classic) were rejected by so many editors that the dejected authors sold away all North American rights for thousand dollars a piece. In his delightful autobiography, Sir Geeffrey Faber, co-founder of the distinguished House of Faber and Faber, confesses to one of the worst instance of wrong guessing on record. "An agent offered me Pearl Buck’s Good Earth," he relates, "and I rejected it, and when I returned the manuscript, It was turned down in turn by a dozen of my competitors, but the agent still had digged faith in it and beged me to reconsider it and I turned him down the second time round". Bad timing has killed more than one book that could have been a resounding success with more adroit handling and one of the first victims of a publisher’s inability to correctly gauge current public reading interest was none other than Henry David Thoreau. In his Journal, he laments that his A Week on the Merrimack and Concorde Rivers — now generally considered an all-time American classic, was published in 1849, when the entire American nation could think of nothing else but the Gold Rush in California and who would want to read a book about 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 10,000 books, most of which I write myself!" Not all masterpieces have been conceived and written in the luxury of a Waldorf suite or the scenic setting of the French Riviera. John Steinbeck, for instance, wrote his first novel, The Cup of Gold, while working as a night watchman on an estate in the Valifornian mountains 7,000 feet high. Frank Yerby, whose The Foxes of Horrow was on the bestseller list for a solid year, wrote most of it while serving as a porter in an aircraft factory. William Faulkner wrote The Sanctuary while serving as a clerk in an Oxford, Mississippi post office. Joel Sayre, author of Rickety Rax novels and The Persian Gulf Command, did most of his writing while serving with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Siberia in 1919. Similar stories could be unearthed about almost every celebrity headliner of today. The first rungs of success are the slipperiest, but the memory of them gives really great writers the necessary perspective and humility after success, that rare paint, has hidden all the ugliness.
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