Most rejections before publishing a book
Can you imagine being rejected 50 times for the same thing? How about more than three times that at 162 total rejections? That was what Dick Wimmer experienced when he tried to get his first book, Irish Wine, published. It took him more than 25 years before he finally accomplished it in 1989. His sequel, Boyne's Lassie, was rejected 83 times before being published. Nevertheless, Wimmer's books were reviewed well by critics.
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The Irish Wine Trilogy
The Irish Wine Trilogy is the original group of short comic novels that first introduced Dick Wimmer’s beloved cast of characters, the same characters who most recently reappeared in The Wildly Irish Sextet.
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Dick Wimmer, Whose Persistence Got Him Published, Dies at 74
In a review for The New York Times, C. D. B. Bryan called it a “taut, finely written, exhaustingly exuberant first novel.” The Los Angeles Times said Mr. Wimmer had encased “the zany saga in an enchanted aura by couching it entirely in the stream-of-consciousness prose hallowed by James Joyce and disciples.”
The New York Times
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Dick Wimmer dies at 74; author whose well-reviewed novel was rejected 162 times
He once laid claim to being history’s most-rejected published novelist. At the time, his closest official competition was Steven Goldberg’s “The Inevitability of Patriarchy,” which sold after 69 rejections, the Guinness Book of World Records told The Times in 1989.
Los Angeles Times
