Source link : https://las-vegas-news.com/7-novels-that-were-rejected-by-every-publisher-but-became-literary-classics/
Every writer with a drawer full of rejection slips has probably wondered whether the manuscript is actually any good. History offers a strange kind of comfort here, because some of the most beloved novels ever printed spent years being turned away by the very industry that eventually made them famous. The gap between what publishers predicted and what readers actually wanted turned out, in these cases, to be enormous.
1. Carrie by Stephen King
Before Stephen King became a household name, he was a schoolteacher living in a trailer, and his manuscript for Carrie had already been thrown in the trash once by King himself. Though King initially gave up on Carrie due to discomfort and apathy, and felt it would never be successful, his wife Tabitha persuaded him to continue writing, and rescued the first three pages of the story from the trash. Even after he finished it, the rejections kept coming.
Carrie had been rejected 30 times before Doubleday took a chance on King’s first novel. One rejection letter reportedly noted that “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.” Doubleday proved that assessment wrong almost immediately, and the novel has since become one of the defining horror debuts of the twentieth century.
2. Dune by Frank Herbert
Frank Herbert spent six years researching and writing what would…
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Author : Matthias Binder
Publish date : 2026-08-20 05:27:00
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