I love stories like this as they involve many favorite things - writers who keep at it even when rejected, food, honoring those who've died...and my alma mater, which has not died, Antioch.
If you get The Sunday New York Times, you'll be able to read the original. Otherwise (or if so inclined, even if), read Alex Witchel's nice recap of The I Hate to Cook Book author Peg Bracken's life (she died in October '07). Antiochians: she graduated in 1940. Here's a snippet:
The men who ruled the world in the late 1950s, or at least six of the men who ruled publishing, rejected Peg Bracken’s manuscript, “The I Hate to Cook Book.” It would never sell, they told her, because “women regard cooking as sacred.” It took a female editor at Harcourt Brace to look at the hundreds of easy-to-follow recipes wittily pitched at the indentured housewife and say, “Hallelujah!” Since its publication in 1960, Bracken’s iconic book, which celebrated the speedy virtues of canned cream-of-mushroom soup and chicken bouillon cubes, has sold more than three million copies. That helped lift her spirits, her daughter, Jo Bracken, said, about her $338 advance.
