I’m reading the book “Rotten Reviews and Rejections,” edited by Bill Henderson & Andre Bernard, and it strikes me repeatedly how many works of genius have been trashed, rejected and rottenly reviewed.

Here are a few:

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Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
We fancy that any real child might be more puzzled than enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story. – Children’s Books.

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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
What has never been alive cannot very well go on living. So this is a book of the season only …. – New York Herald Tribune

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Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Heller wallows in his own laughter and finally drowns in it. What remains is a debris of sour jokes, stage anger, dirty words, synthetic looniness, and the sort of antic behavior the children fall into when they know they are losing our attention. – Whitey Balliett, The New Yorker

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Rudyard Kipling
I’m sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language. – San Francisco Examiner, rejection letter to Kipling

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The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Few readers will want to subject themselves to the demands of this huge complex and ugly book . . . The apparatus becomes tiresome, the obscenities and clinical language depressing; the occasional satisfactions of seeing how bits of the puzzle fit together are not enough. – Christian Science Monitor

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Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
. . . a gadfly with delusions of grandeur. – Time