Rejection letters as literature: The best (and worst) no's in publishing history

There’s something perversely comforting about reading other people’s rejection letters. Especially the ones addressed to now-immovable titans of literature.

Vladimir Nabokov, Sylvia Plath, and George Orwell were all rejected with varying degrees of disdain, confusion, or complete indifference. It reminds us that the taste-making machinery of publishing is imperfect, and that a firm "no" isn’t always the final answer.

Sometimes these letters serve as miniature masterclasses in poor judgement. "We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias," wrote one editor of 1984. 

To Sylvia Plath: "There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice." Even The Diary of Anne Frank was once dismissed as having no commercial appeal. Brutal, baffling, and now almost laughably wrong.

Here are five of the most famous, and telling, literary rejections:

1. George Orwell, Animal Farm

Faber & Faber rejected Orwell's political allegory, with T.S. Eliot himself claiming it was not convincing — even though he admitted its cleverness.

2. Sylvia Plath, early poetry submissions

One publisher declared, "There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice." Plath would go on to define confessional poetry.

3. William Golding, Lord of the Flies

Rejected by over 20 publishers. One editor commented it was "an absurd and uninteresting fantasy... rubbish and dull."

4. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Labelled "overwhelmingly nauseating" by one American publisher. It would later be considered a modern classic.

5. Stephen King, Carrie

Rejected 30 times. King famously threw the manuscript in the bin — his wife retrieved it. The rest is bestselling history.

But there’s no shortage of other near-misses that went on to define literary careers. Twelve publishers turned down J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone before Bloomsbury gave it a shot. Reportedly at the urging of the chairman’s eight-year-old daughter.

John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces was published posthumously, after years of rejections and the author’s tragic death. His mother and author Walker Percy saw it through, and it won the Pulitzer Prize.

Even Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig holds the record for being rejected 121 times before finding a publisher. It went on to sell five million copies.

J.K. Rowling experienced it again she submitted The Cuckoo’s Calling, the first novel in her Strike series, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, several publishers turned it down. One even advised the author to take a writing course. Only after the real identity was leaked did the book receive the attention (and sales) it arguably always deserved.

But not all rejections are careless. Some are beautifully written. There’s a poetry to a well-crafted refusal, a tactful blend of regret and admiration, the editorial equivalent of letting someone down gently after a very awkward date. These letters say: It’s not you, it’s the list. You’re brilliant, just not quite right for us.

And that, really, is the trick. The best rejection letters read like small essays in themselves. They reveal editorial priorities, industry trends, and human biases. They expose the weird pressure publishers feel to predict the market, and the way that pressure shapes which voices are heard and which are shelved.

For writers, collecting these artefacts can become a strange sort of motivation. They are failures, yes, but also odd relics of perseverance, reminders that behind every celebrated work is a trail of closed doors, stamped envelopes, and very nearly's.

So next time you get a rejection, keep it. Pin it up, read it aloud, and annotate it like a critic. Who knows, it might outlive the book it turned down.