Rejection letters

David Oshinsky writes in the New YorkTimes - No Thanks, Mr Nabokov

No can scoff at Alfred A Knopf's record of producing 17 Nobel Prize
winners not to mention 47 Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes of fiction, nonfiction, biography and history. For most of the 20^th century, Knopf was the gold standard in book publishing. It still is and will probably continue to be. But some of the rejection letters (and reasons for rejecting certain works) sent out by the publisher are hilarious:

Pearl Buck's novel The Good Earth: rejected on the grounds that Americans were 'not interested in anything on China.']

George Orwell's Animal Farm: the rejection came with an explanation that it was 'impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.'

Others included:

Jorge Luis Borges : '... utterly untranslatable'
Isaac Bashevis Singer: '... it's Poland and the rich Jews again'
Anaïs Nin: '...there is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic'
Sylvia Plath: '... there certainly isn't enough genuine talent for us to take notice'
Jack Kerouac: '... his frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don't think so'.

And Knopf also turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita ('too racy') and James Baldwin’s Giovanni's Room ('hopelessly bad').

And the clincher: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank -- 'very dull ... a dreary
record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions.'
(The Diary of a Young Girl was rejected by 15 other publishers but went on to sell 30 million copies.)

Full story: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/books/review/Oshinsky-t.html