Publishers and Rejecting Winners

Last Sunday there was an amusing New York Times article by David Oshinsky. The topic was how at least one publisher - Alfred A. Knopf, whose long-time editor Ashbel Green is retiring at the end of this year - had managed to turn down a host of promising books, including Anne Frank's diary ("a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions"), Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth (Americans weren't "interested in anything on China"), and George Orwell's Animal Farm ("impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A."). Other rejects? Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anaïs Nin, Sylvia Plath, and Jack Kerouac.

What is interesting is to remember that this type of article appears periodically, and people always seem tickled by the fallibility of publishers' sensibilities. But the story is hardly new. Walt Whitman had to self-publish Leaves of Grass at first. Dozens of publishers snubbed the original Chicken Soup for the Soul and What Color is Your Parachute - neither on the same literary level, but evidence that the publishing world can't even reliably predict tastes of the mass market. And with the growing demand for authors that have a "platform," it makes me wonder how many resoundingly good books, stories, poems, essays, biographies, histories, and other works of the mind fall to the wayside, never to be seen other than by friends and family.

Jane Austen Makes the Publishing Rounds

David Lassman, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, set out to learn how the British publishing industry would react to the author. So he bundled up some introductory chapters of her books, changing some small details (names, basically), and sent them on, according to a Guardian article. Apparently only one person responded noting that it was actually Austen. ("I suggest you reach for your copy of Pride and Prejudice, which I'd guess lives in close proximity to your typewriter, and make sure that your opening pages don't too closely mimic that book's opening.") Most simply responded with form letters, though, when questioned, were saying, "Well, oh, of course we knew it was Austen, or something famous, or maybe like a movie we saw once. You know, with Emma Thompson and she plays that potential old maid? Did you see it?" OK, possibly not quite like that.

This sort of literary prank does happen now and again, and the media generally treat it as something that no one has ever before tried. I do wonder how often the editors actually recognize the text and don't bother to say, "Oh, look, you're taking the structure of X" because they're ticked that someone is trying to trick them. Then again, maybe the kids - as they're often the only ones who will live on the meager salaries - that are in acquisitions haven't read them.