• Dr. Seuss' first children's book, And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, was rejected by 27 publishers. The 28th publisher, Vanguard press, sold 6 million copies of the book. Dr. Seuss’ children's books went on to sell a total of more than 100 million copies.
• Pearl Buck's, The Good Earth, was rejected 14 times and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.
• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer was rejected 12 times. 
• Margaret Mitchell's classic, Gone with the Wind, was turned down by more than 25 publishers.
• Robert Pirsig's classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was rejected by 121 publishers before being published. 
• Fifteen publishers and 30 agents turned down John Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill. More than 60 million copies of his novels are now in print. 
• The movie, Star Wars, was rejected by every movie studio in Hollywood before 20th Century Fox finally produced it. It went on to become one of the largest grossing movies in film history.
• In 1889, Rudyard Kipling, who later won the Nobel prize for literature, received the following rejection letter from the San Francisco Examiner: "I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language." 
• Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace, flunked out of college. He was described as "both unable and unwilling to learn."
• Woody Allen - Academy Award-winning writer, producer and director - failed motion picture production at New York University and the City College of New York. He also failed English at New York University.
• Malcolm Forbes, the late editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine, one of the most successful business publications in the world, failed to make the staff of the school newspaper when he was an undergraduate at Princeton University. 
• After Thomas Carlyle lent the manuscript of The French Revolution to a friend whose servant carelessly used it to kindle a fire, he calmly went to work and rewrote it. 
  
  Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Bud Gardner
  (c)2000. All rights reserved. Reprinted from Chicken Soup for the Writer's Soul by Jack Canfield, Marc Victor Hansen, Bud Gardner. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher. Publisher: Health Communications, Inc

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