Le Jongleur de Notre Dame

The year 1939 had been rude to Richard Sullivan. A sweet-tempered and longsuffering professor of English and creative writing at Notre Dame, Sullivan ’30 maintained an active typewriter and soaring literary aspirations. Nine years out from his own graduation, he’d managed to publish a few poems and short stories in magazines like Scribner’s and had even broken into the ranks of Atlantic Monthly contributors, but the shine from such success was fading beneath a thickening stack of rejection slips — each one preserved in Sullivan’s papers in the University of Notre Dame Archives.

Mildred Boie, an editor at the elite Boston literary journal, was a master of the tart, one-line dismissal, and from May to December Sullivan received about one cutting rebuff from her a month.

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