Ursula K. Le Guin wrote after the children went to bed and (when they got older) during their school hours, but it took many years before her stories and poems found acceptance. Her work now includes 24 novels, 10 volumes each of poetry and short story collections, 15 children’s books, as well as literary criticisms and translations.
Le Guin’s early stories were rejected because editors found them a challenge to categorize. From an NNDB.com bio:
Although editors were routinely praising the quality of her writing, they also found her stories difficult to pigeonhole. Typically they were rejected as not being “quite right” for the style or genre of a particular magazine or publishing house. In large part this was because much of her early material was neither wholly fantasy/sci-fi nor quite mainstream fiction. In later years the whole new sub genre of magical realism, introduced by South American writers, would underscore the limitations of such constricting genres.
Here’s a copy of a rejection letter that was sent to her agent in 1968:
Ursula K. Le Guin writes extremely well, but I’m sorry to have to say that on the basis of that one highly distinguishing quality alone I cannot make you an offer for the novel. The book is so endlessly complicated by details of reference and information, the interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the very action of the story seems to be to become hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually, unreadable. The whole is so dry and airless, so lacking in pace, that whatever drama and excitement the novel might have had is entirely dissipated by what does seem, a great deal of the time, to be extraneous material. My thanks nonetheless for having thought of us. The manuscript of The Left Hand of Darkness is returned herewith.
The book eventually found a publisher, and ended up winning the 1969 Nebula and 1970 Hugo awards. Le Guin has received the National Book Award, five Hugos, five Nebulas, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize and several “lifetime achievement” awards among dozens of other honors.
Want to find out about other famous author rejections? Visit Writers & Rejections: Don’t Give Up!
Sources:
Ursula Le Guin website: A Rejection Letter
NNDB.com
Wikipedia entry on Ursula K. Le Guin
Salon article on Ursula K. Le Guin
Epoch Times article
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s one of my favourite stories, although I have to be feeling quite robust to read it because I remember it as being very sad.
Thanks for all the heartening articles that underline the subjective nature of acceptance and rejections. I’m enjoying this series.
Ouch!
Persistence is a great virtue for an author. I think I might have crumbled under the weight of “The whole is so dry and airless, so lacking in pace,…”
How important it is to remember that it’s just one person’s opinion!
Glad you’re enjoying the series, FairyHedgeHog!
Julie: I know! I don’t think I would have taken it nearly as well as Ms. Le Guin; that rejection letter was -horrible-. She’s being very gracious on her website and not naming names, though.
And thank you for stabbing me in the heart, mister publisher. may I have some more?
Seriously, this is probably how I would have reacted… before bursting out into tears, that is. It just proves that authors need more than supple typing fingers: they need skin as thick as the Earth’s crust. I think every writer, no matter how confident on the outside, has that insecure schoolgirl/boy deep inside them, that wants to hang out with the cool kids.
Thank you so much for celebrating one of my favorite authors on her 80th birthday, and for sharing her journey to publication with all of us. How true it is: Rejection visits the home of every writer.
Happy Birthday, Ursula LeGuin. And many more!
Oh good lord! Give me a form-letter rejection any day!
Thanks for the great post.
A rejection letter (even of this magnitude) doth not mean the end of a career.
Pursue, persevere and publish!