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Stacy Conradt
The Quick 10: How 10 Famous People Were Rejected
by Stacy Conradt - February 5, 2009 - 4:10 PM

q10

As a writer, I have definitely gotten my share of rejection letters. It’s a bit disheartening, to be sure. But I guess I can take some comfort in the fact that even people who were later at the top of their fields were dissed at one point. I’ll share this list of 10 with you… if Jason doesn’t reject my post.

hendrix1. Jimi Hendrix and his band opened for the Monkees once and got booed off of stage. They were consequently dropped from the tour. Can you imagine?
2. Jack Kerouac tried to find a publisher for On the Road for six years.
3. Elvis was kicked out of the Grand Ole Opry in 1954 – they told him to stick to his day job driving trucks.
4. Emily Dickinson gave her poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson to review, and while he was impressed, he advised against publishing them because they were too peculiar. She was totally enamored of him anyway and replied to his criticisms by saying that she had “few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you, my tears would block my tongue.”
5. Winston Churchill failed the Royal Military entrance exams twice.
6. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind was rejected by 38 publishers before it finally got green-lighted.
7. Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was writing for nine years before he hit it big – and reportedly only made $20 from his writing for those first nine years.
8. Lucille Ball got sent home from acting school in New York because the teachers thought she was too shy and would never make it as an actress.
9. Monopoly was almost never made – Parker Brothers rejected Charles Darrow’s idea in 1931 (too complex), but recanted a few years later and started making the game, which is now the best-selling board game ever.
10. James Joyce’s Dubliners was rejected 22 times. Even after it got published it didn’t do too well: only 379 copies sold the first year it was available, and Joyce bought 120 of those himself.

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Comments (10)

  1. And of course, there’s the story of Decca Records telling an up and coming band from Liverpool that “groups with guitars are on their way out”. The Beatles later signed with EMI.

    posted by Jon Terry on 2-5-2009 at 4:28 pm

  2. Thanks for the reminder! Keepin’ on…

    posted by Reed on 2-5-2009 at 4:51 pm

  3. Honestly, if I were a publisher, and some guy named Jack Kerouac came into my office with a 120-foot scroll of typing paper pages taped together, covered in blocks of single-spaced, non-formatted paragraphs, which he claimed to have written in only three weeks, I’m not sure I would have even bothered to read it, let alone publish it.

    posted by SpaceMonkeyX on 2-5-2009 at 5:02 pm

  4. Hendrix got booed of the stage and removed from the concert because his act was not compatible with/appropriate for the Monkees’ audience.

    posted by PartiallyDeflected on 2-5-2009 at 9:30 pm

  5. Oh, Emily Dickinson… my tears block my tongue.

    posted by adrienne on 2-5-2009 at 10:25 pm

  6. Fascinating! I agree with SpaceMonkey–I can’t say I actually blame the publishers too much on that one. I probably would have called security. :)

    Gone with the Wind is interesting. I wonder what the rationale for its rejection was–perhaps length? (By the way, GWTW would make an excellent post sometime–Quick 10 or otherwise–you could do the book and/or the movie.)

    posted by kate on 2-6-2009 at 9:01 am

  7. I know it is not as impressive, but Gene Hackman was told in acting school that he had no talent, no timing and would never succeed as an actor.
    (At least from what I remember of his appearance on “Inside the Actor’s Studio”).

    posted by Scotty on 2-6-2009 at 9:18 am

  8. Over 25 years ago in school I dropped out of guitar class because I was afraid I would fail. The school put me in typing class instead. If I would have stayed in guitar class, would you be listing to my music right now instead of reading what I typed?

    posted by Jason on 2-6-2009 at 10:28 am

  9. Michael Jordan was cut from his High School basketball team. Go figure!

    posted by Marleny on 2-6-2009 at 1:01 pm

  10. Not really sure that Monopoly belongs on this list … Google it. Monopoly and “creator” Charles Darrow have somewhat of a dark history.

    posted by Rachel on 3-4-2009 at 2:30 am

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