To the Editor:

The rumor, suspected by writer Claudia Bemel in Jeffrey Miller’s story, “Writer at Work” [November 1983], that “someone had typed out one of Jerzy Kosinski’s books, verbatim, . . . and sent it around as an unsolicited manuscript; even the book’s publishers had refused it (so the story went)” is, as I am sure Miss Bemel suspected, true. Fourteen publishers and thirteen agents (100 percent of my randomly selected sample group) did not recognize and rejected Kosinski’s National Book Award winner Steps when I sent it to them as an unsolicited manuscript. Random House, the novel’s original publisher, sent back a form rejection note, while Houghton Mifflin, Kosinski’s publisher at the time of my experiment, wrote:

Several of us read your untitled novel here with admiration for writing and style. Jerzy Kosinski comes to mind as a point of comparison when reading the stark, chilly episodic incidents you have set down. The drawback to the manuscript, as it stands, is that it doesn’t add up to a satisfactory whole. It has some impressive moments, but gives the impression of sketchiness and incompleteness.

As Claudia Bemel discovers in Mr. Miller’s tale, in the publishing game, a rose by any other name is not always a rose.

Chuck Ross
Santa Monica, California

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