Cummings Dedicated a Book to the 14 Publishers Who Rejected It
Quick answer: In 1935 E.E. Cummings published No Thanks with a dedication naming the 14 publishers who rejected it, funded by his mother. The story behind the famous page.
Open the 1935 collection No Thanks and the dedication page stops you before a single poem does. Under the words NO THANKS TO, E.E. Cummings listed fourteen publishing houses: Farrar & Rinehart, Simon & Schuster, Coward-McCann, Limited Editions, Harcourt Brace, Random House, Equinox Press, Smith & Haas, Viking Press, Knopf, Dutton, Harper's, Scribner's and Covici-Friede. Every one of them had turned the manuscript down. Cummings arranged their names on the page in the shape of a funeral urn.
It is the most famous act of publishing revenge in American poetry, and it is funnier the closer you look, because the joke sits on top of real desperation. This was not a beginner collecting his first rejections. By 1934 Cummings had been publishing books for over a decade and still could not get a poetry manuscript through a single front door in New York.
Not a beginner, and still unwanted
By the time No Thanks went looking for a home, Cummings had published The Enormous Room, his 1922 account of being held in a French detention camp during the First World War, the poetry collections Tulips and Chimneys, & and is 5 in the 1920s, and ViVa in 1931. He had a Harvard education, a Paris apprenticeship and a reputation, though the reputation cut both ways: reviewers loved or loathed his dismantled syntax and scattered typography, and there was little middle ground.
Then the Depression arrived and hollowed out whatever commercial appetite poetry had. Publishers in 1934 were cutting lists, not gambling on a poet whose lowercase letters and exploded punctuation looked, to a cautious sales department, like typesetting errors. Fourteen houses passed. A mid-career rejection of this kind stings in a particular way, because it cannot be explained away as inexperience. The market had seen exactly who he was, and said no.
A loan from his mother
The book existed because Rebecca Haswell Cummings believed in her son. It is widely reported that she lent him three hundred dollars, serious money in 1935, to have the collection produced. The printer was Samuel Jacobs of the Golden Eagle Press, a typographer who had set Cummings's work before and who understood that every eccentric space on the page was deliberate.
The edition was small and carefully made, issued in a handful of formats for collectors and ordinary readers. This matters to the story: Cummings did not respond to rejection by softening the poems into something more sellable. He responded by finding a craftsman who could realise them exactly, and paying for it with borrowed family money. The book the fourteen houses refused went into the world unchanged.
The urn on the dedication page
The dedication is a joke with a body in it. An urn holds ashes, and Cummings shaped the names of his rejectors into a vessel for the death of his own commercial hopes, then thanked them for nothing at the top. It is bitter, but the craft of the bitterness is the point: he turned the humiliation into a designed object, a poem made of publishers' names.
There was also a quieter act of record-keeping in it. Rejection usually vanishes; the writer hides it and the publishers never mention it. Cummings printed it, permanently. Later editions of his work kept the dedication, so every reader since 1935 has known precisely who declined No Thanks. He converted the industry's silence into part of the book's meaning, which is a deeper revenge than anger.
What changed afterwards
Nothing changed overnight, which is the honest part of the story. But the reputation kept consolidating. In 1938 Harcourt Brace, one of the fourteen names in the urn, brought out his Collected Poems, a quietly satisfying reversal. The honours arrived in a slow procession: a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets in 1950, the Charles Eliot Norton lectureship at Harvard in 1952, delivered as the playful i: six nonlectures, and the Bollingen Prize in 1958.
By his death in 1962, it is widely reported that Cummings was among the most read poets in America, with only Robert Frost ahead of him in popular affection. The poems in No Thanks, including the famous grasshopper poem whose letters leap and reassemble across the page, are now standard anthology pieces studied by people who have never heard of the fourteen houses that refused them.
The lesson inside the urn
Read plainly, the story says: persistence wins. Read honestly, it says something more useful. Cummings had a safety net, a mother with three hundred dollars and total faith, and that net is part of why the book exists. Most writers do not have one, and pretending otherwise turns a true story into a poster. What every writer can copy is not the loan but the refusal to dilute. Fourteen rejections would push most of us to make the work more ordinary. He made it more itself.
The other transferable part is the ledger. Cummings knew exactly how many houses had passed, and on what. Writers who track their submissions, keep the work circulating and treat each no as an address change rather than a judgement tend to be the ones still publishing a decade later. A rejection only becomes final when the manuscript stops moving; entering work somewhere it will actually be read and scored, as every poem is in Writory's monthly contest, is one way to make sure silence is never the last word.
Reading Cummings now
Start with the early lyric poems from Tulips and Chimneys and is 5, where the tenderness under the typography is easiest to hear, then take No Thanks slowly, reading each poem aloud so the spacing becomes timing rather than decoration. Watch what he does with the smallest words, articles and pronouns, and how a broken line teaches your eye the speed of a feeling. His experiments look wild, but underneath them sits an old-fashioned love poet with a sonneteer's discipline, which is exactly why the strangeness holds up.
What poets can take from this
- Keep a submissions ledger; knowing your numbers turns rejection from a mood into data.
- Never revise toward blandness to please a rejection; fix real faults, keep the strangeness that is yours.
- If you self-fund publication, spend the money on craft, as Cummings did with a typographer who understood the work.
- Let rejection become material; the urn dedication is proof that even a no can be composed.
- Mid-career rejection is normal, not regression; publishing history is full of established writers refused at their peak.
- Read your own strangest work aloud before judging it; sound often justifies what the eye distrusts.
Try it yourself
Write a poem addressed to everyone who has ever said no to you, in any form. The rule: no complaint and no self-pity is allowed on the page. Let the shape of the poem, its spacing and its timing, carry the feeling instead.
Questions
How many publishers rejected No Thanks?
Fourteen. Cummings named all of them, from Farrar & Rinehart to Covici-Friede, on the dedication page of the 1935 book, arranging the names in the shape of a funeral urn beneath the words NO THANKS TO.
Who paid for No Thanks to be published?
His mother, Rebecca Haswell Cummings, is widely reported to have lent him three hundred dollars to cover the printing. The book was produced in 1935 by Samuel Jacobs's Golden Eagle Press, a typographer sympathetic to Cummings's experimental layouts.
Was E.E. Cummings successful in his lifetime?
Eventually, very. After decades of divided reviews he received the Academy of American Poets fellowship in 1950, gave the Norton lectures at Harvard, and won the Bollingen Prize in 1958. By his death in 1962 he was among the most widely read poets in America.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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