Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov - turned down by publishers Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday. One of last centurys most important books.
The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck, turned down by publisher Knopf, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1932. The best selling novel in the United States in both 1931 and 1932,[1] it was an influential factor in Buck winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.
Animal Farm, George Orwell, turned down by four (4!) publishers. Time magazine chose the book as one of the 100 best English-language novels (1923 to 2005);[4] it also places at number 31 on the Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels. It won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 1996 and is also included in the Great Books of the Western World. One of the rejections came from T.S. Eliot. "We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time,” wrote Eliot, adding that he thought its “view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing”.
Eliot wrote: “After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”
The War Of The Worlds, H.G. Wells, one publisher's rejection letter described the book as "An endless nightmare. I do not believe it would 'take'...I think the verdict would be 'Oh, don't read that horrid book.'"
Stephen King received dozens of rejections for his first novel, Carrie; he kept them tidily nailed to a spike under a timber in his bedroom. One of the publishers sent Mr. King's rejection with these words: "We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell."
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was rejected by a dozen publishers, including biggies like Penguin and HarperCollins. Bloomsbury, a small London publisher, only took it on at the behest of the CEO’s eight-year old daughter, who begged her father to print the book.
Lord Of The Flies, Diary Of Anne Frank, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Gone With The Wind, all turned down by publishers.