Organizer: Amanda Malone

Gwendolyn Brooks began work on what would become her first novel, Maud Martha, in 1944, first submitting the manuscript to her editors in 1947. And yet, her novel would not be published until almost a decade later. Brooks’s manuscript faced a series of rejections on its way to publication, each critical of her foray into a new genre: her Harper’s editor called it “too hampered by a self-consciousness more suited to poetry than prose.” Though Maud Martha was met with positive reviews, it was slow to step out of the shadows of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or Richard Wright’s Native Son—“complex, powerful urban novels,” as Mary Helen Washington says, that left Maud Martha the “invisible woman of the 1950s.” 

Muriel Rukeyser’s Savage Coast, written in 1936, would face a similar fate until the novel’s publication in 2013. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein discovered the manuscript beneath the publisher’s rejection letter, which called it “BAD” and “a waste of time,” its bisexual protagonist “too abnormal for us to respect.” After abandoning Savage Coast, Rukeyser would publish her magnum opus The Book of the Dead, and not until the 1990s would she begin to be recognized among other authors of modernist epics. 

• How do authors’ raced and gendered identities, nationalities, or relationships to colonialism affect how we think about the rejection or acceptance of their work?


• How may we think critically about literature’s consecrating authorities, including publishing houses, prize committees, and institutions? 


• Following Bourdieu or Casanova, how may we think about rejection, or acceptance, in the context of the world literary system or world republic of letters?


• How do we think about the timeliness of works via resurgences or delayed interest in them, even their delayed publication? 


• How do we think about works rejected for their transgressions of genre, scale, political content, or other qualities? 


• What makes a work “BAD” or good, and for whom? What is the difference between a critical reception and a popular or commercial reception? 


• How is rejection generative, punitive, or limiting? Can the same be said of acceptance?