Harcourt Brace published Jack Kerouac‘s first novel, The Town and The City, (written under the name John Kerouac) in 1950, when the author was just 28. After the book proved a commercial failure, Harcourt refused to publish Kerouac’s second novel — rejecting On the Road in 1951. Now considered a modern classic, On the Road didn’t find a publisher for six years, until Viking Press issued the book in 1957.
RAY BRADBURY TALKS REJECTION…
(from Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life)
…starting when I was fifteen I began to send short stories to magazines like Esquire, and they, very promptly, sent them back two days before they got them! I have several walls in several rooms of my house covered with the snowstorm of rejections, but they didn’t realize what a strong person I was; I persevered and wrote a thousand more dreadful short stories, which were rejected in turn.
Then, during the late forties, I actually began to sell short stories and accomplished some sort of deliverance from snowstorms [of rejection slips] in my fourth decade. But even today, my latest books of short stories contain at least seven stories that were rejected by every magazine in the United States and also in Sweden! …The blizzard doesn’t last forever; it just seems so.
Photo: Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) at home in Los Angeles
Silver Birch Press 