“You don’t want to escape and I don’t want to escape, but perhaps the public does and perhaps we are in the business of helping them do that.”
Toni Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters in 16 years as a Random House editor, long and specific and direct. She liked one 1977 manuscript enough to pass it around the office, and her colleagues killed it as too depressing to sell. Random House had gone public, been bought by RCA, and then sold to the Newhouse family. One of the best readers in American publishing spent her days explaining that good books don’t fit the spreadsheet.