Melina Moe, curator of literature at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, has written a lovely piece for the Los Angeles Review Books on the rejection letters Toni Morrison wrote while an editor at Random House:
Morrison’s rejections tend to be long, generous in their suggestions, and direct in their criticism. The letters themselves—generally one, two at most, exchanged with a given writer—constitute an asymmetrical archive. On one end of each communiqué is the ghost of a submitted manuscript … On the other is a rejection from Morrison, sometimes brusque yet typically offering something more than an expression of disinterest—notes on craft, character development, the need for more (or less) drama. But also: Autopsies of a changing, and in many ways diminishing, publishing industry; frustrations with the tastes of a reading public; and sympathies for poets, short story writers, and other authors drawn to commercially hopeless genres.
The observations on publishing are fascinating and a reminder that some things never change:
Comments closedMorrison’s letters are unexpectedly forthcoming. Often, she supplements her rejections with diagnoses of an ailing publishing business, growing frustrations with unimaginative taste, the industry’s aversion to risk-taking, and her own sense of creative constraint working at a commercial press (especially in the late 1970s and early ’80s; Morrison left editorial work to be a full-time novelist in the early 1980s). They sketch a “road not taken” in mainstream publishing, as experimental volumes, poetry, and short story collections were increasingly treated as suspect investments of editorial time and publishing house resources. Current market conditions made for “a losing proposition for the publisher and a hopeless one for short story writers,” Morrison informed one author, and unless they were penned by famous novelists, short story collections were “almost like the publication of poetry”—that is, “practically impossible to make a profit from.” In another, lengthy letter from 1977, Morrison outlined how the economics of a book project depended on the mechanisms of distribution. It wasn’t just that casual readers didn’t buy short story collections, but that the major institutions responsible for generating widespread enthusiasm and name recognition were also uninterested: “Book clubs do not make offers for collections of short stories; mass paperback houses do not make offers for collections of short stories by single authors and so we are left with the hope that ten or fifteen thousand people will go into a bookstore and ask for a particular author by name.” The rejection concludes with Morrison’s admission that “[t]here is no point in my being other than honest with you, you should continue to publish in magazines and if you ever decide to write a novel, I’d be delighted to look at it.”