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At the age of 24 in 1828, Nathaniel Hawthorne — author of the soon-to-be-classic The Scarlet Letter — had to pay the sizeable sum of $100 to publish his first novel, Fanshawe, possibly the earliest novel of college life written in America. Leo Tolstoy invested 4500 rubles ($12,700) to publish what critics have called one of the world's greatest novels, War and Peace — a huge sum and a huge gamble, even by an author who was already known! Marcel Proust looked in vain for a publisher for his classic Remembrance of Things Past, before paying French publisher Bernard Grasset to bring out the first 1500 pages. And did you know that Rod McKuen, the best-selling poet, paid to publish his first book? The writer's talent was then recognized by Random House who later sold more than 900,000 copies of Listen to the Warm...
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 Original Manuscript of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past |
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 Rod McKuen |
