Kerouac: Your good isn't good enough

Maybe this will help take the sting out of rejection.
The New York Times' David Oshinsky discusses how scholars have recently gone through the Alfred A. Knopf Inc. archive and discovered some eye-openers in the rejection pile.

Some highlights:

• Jack Kerouac: “His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so”).
• Vladimir Nabokov's “Lolita”: Too racy
  
• James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room”: “hopelessly bad”