Consider This The marvelous richness of human excperience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were not limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse.Helen KellerRichard Hooker worked for seven years on his humorous war novel, M*A*S*H* only to have it rejected by twenty-one publishers before Morrow decided to publish it. It became a runaway bestseller, spawning a blockbuster movie and a highly successful television series.Richard Bach completed only one year of college, then trained to become an Air Force jet-fighter pilot. Twenty months after earning his wings, he resigned. Then he became an editor of an aviation magazine that went bankrupt. Life became one failure after another. Even when he wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull, he couldn't think of an ending. The 10,000-word manuscript lay dormant for eight years before he decided how to finish it--only to have eighteen publishers reject it before it was finally published by Macmillan. However once it was published, the book went on to sell more than 7 million copies in numerous languages and make Richard Bach an internationally known and respected author.Louis L'Amour, successful author of more than 100 western novels with more than 200 million copies in print, received 350 rejections before he made his first sale. He later became the first American novelist to receive a special congressional gold medal in recognition of his distinguished career as an author and contributor to the nation through his historically based books.British Writer John Creasy received 774 rejections before selling his first story. He went on to write 564 books, using fourteen different names.In 1953, Julia Child and her two collaborators signed a publishing contract to produce a book tentatively titled French Cooking for the American Kitchen. Julia and her colleagues worked on the book for five years. The publisher rejected the 850-page manuscript. Child and her partners worked for another year totally revising the manuscript. Again the publisher rejected it. But Julia Child did not give up. She and her collaborators went back to work again, found a new publisher, and in 1961--eight years after beginning--they published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which has sold more than one million copies. In 1966, Time magazine featured Julia Child on its cover. Julia Child is still at the top of her field thirty years later.Dr. Seuss' first children's book, And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, was rejected by twenty-seven publishers. The twenty-eighth publisher, Vanguard press, sold six million copies of the book. All of his children's books went on to sell a total of more than 100 million copies.The author William Kennedy had written several manuscripts, all of them rejected by numerous publishers before his "sudden success" with his novel Ironweed, which was rejected by thirteen publishers before it was finally accept Excerpted from Chicken Soup for the Writer's Soul: Stories to Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit of Writers by Jack L. Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Bud Gardner, Jack Canfield All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
