Even the best writers wrote first novels that no one wanted to publish, or that didn’t sell as well as subsequent novels. To wit:

Anthony Trollope, The Macdermots of Ballycloran

In his mid-twenties, he worked for the post office in London and then Ireland, where he began writing at his home in Clonmel. His first novel was nothing to do with bishops, rural deans, or aspiring politicians. The Macdermots of Ballycloran, published in 1847 when the Irish famine was at its height, tells the tragic story of a doomed Irish family. Very few copies were sold. His publishers, possibly to help sales, claimed it was the work of Fanny Trollope, the author’s mother, whose scornful Domestic Manners of the Americans caused a transatlantic scandal in 1832.

Thomas Hardy, The Poor Man and the Lady

Hardy spent his early twenties in London. By day, he was an architect’s apprentice; by night, a prolific amateur poet.

In 1867, he returned to Dorset and decided to try fiction. The result was The Poor Man and the Lady, about a society beauty’s liaison with a countryman.

The manuscript was rejected by at least five publishers before Hardy gave up trying to sell it.

Thankfully, Desperate Remedies was published four years later and he hit the jackpot with Far from the Madding Crowd.

Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of St. Anthony

Being Flaubert’s friend sounds like a barrel of laughs. In 1849, the young Frenchman spent four days beside a fire, reading his newly completed novel The Temptation of St. Anthony aloud to his friends Louis Bouilhet and Maxime du Camp. His listeners were allowed only short breaks for meals. When Flaubert asked them what they thought, they advised him to throw it on the fire. Three years later, Flaubert began work on Madame Bovary.

Anthony Burgess, A Vision of Battlements

The astonishingly prolific Burgess is generally thought to have burst into print in 1956 with Time for a Tiger, the first book of his “Malayan trilogy.” In fact, his first completed book was A Vision of Battlements, a semi-autobiographical account written in 1949, about his time with the Army Educational Corps in Gibraltar, teaching squaddies a course on the “British Way and Purpose.” The novel’s title refers to a symptom of astigmatism. His debut and his second novel, The Worm and the Ring, and a collection of poems, were all rejected by publishers. It was only after another foreign excursion, this time to Malaya, did his work get into print. And only after the success of A Clockwork Orange—which was published in 1962—did A Vision of Battlements hit the bookshops in 1965. Burgess died a wealthy man, but his first novel never enjoyed high sales.

John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold

The Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Grapes of Wrath had a tough time getting noticed. He studied English at Stanford University, but left in 1925 to make his fortune by his pen in New York. It was a disaster: he couldn’t get published. He returned to California, but rallied enough to finish Cup of Gold, a historical novel about the seventeenth-century pirate Henry Morgan. It was published in 1929 but attracted little attention. Nor did his next two novels, The Pastures of Heaven and To a God Unknown. “It is an awful lot of work to write a novel,” he told an old classmate. Only with Tortilla Flat (1935) did he start to find an audience.