John Irving’s 1978 novel The World According to Garp contains the complete text of a novella, “The Pension Grillparzer.” Garp, an aspiring writer, submits it to a magazine and receives a summary rejection: “The story is only mildly interesting, and it does nothing new with language or with form. Thanks for showing it to us, though.”

When Irving’s editor asked whether this might seem too abrupt, Irving showed him a rejection slip from the Paris Review — he had submitted “The Pension Grillparzer” to them just to see what would happen and, receiving this response, inserted it verbatim into the novel. “I tried the story with American Review, too, they turned it down. And even two non-literary magazines didn’t want it: The New Yorker and Esquire.”

“It was a good feeling when ‘The Pension Grillparzer’ was repeatedly singled out as one of the strongest parts of the novel, and it won the Pushcart Prize for short fiction that year. One literary magazine, Antaeus, did publish it. Naturally, I’ve liked them ever since.”

While Bret Harte was serving as proofreader for a provincial newspaper in Yreka, Calif., he was asked to consider a flowery obituary that contained the sentence “Even in Yreka her chastity was conspicuous.”

Harte realized with a smile that the writer had probably meant “charity,” so he underscored “chastity” and put a question mark in parentheses in the margin, to indicate that the word should be checked.

The following morning he picked up the paper and read: “Even in Yreka her chastity was conspicuous (?)”

In 1938, poet Chard Powers Smith took a half-finished novel to Scribner’s. They liked the text but objected to the title, which they thought would discourage customers. Smith agreed to change it, and the next year The Artillery of Time was published.

Smith’s original title was The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck’s novel appeared a few weeks later.

The celebrated Foulises, of Glasgow, attempted to publish a work which should be a perfect specimen of typographical accuracy. Every precaution was taken to secure the desired result. Six experienced proof-readers were employed, who devoted hours to the reading of each page; and after it was thought to be perfect, it was posted up in the hall of the university, with notification that a reward of fifty pounds would be paid to any person who could discover an error. Each page was suffered to remain two weeks in the place where it had been posted, before the work was printed, and the printers thought that they had attained the object for which they had been striving. When the work was issued, it was discovered that several errors had been committed, one of which was in the first line of the first page.

— William Keddie, Cyclopædia of Literary and Scientific Anecdote, 1854

“The fact remains that the four greatest novelists the world has ever known, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoi and Dostoievsky, wrote their respective languages very indifferently. It proves that if you can tell stories, create character, devise incidents, and if you have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.” — Somerset Maugham