Art & Creativity Quote by George Ade

Rejection is supposed to humble an artist; Ade’s line turns it into a punchline and, quietly, a strategy. “After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity” skewers a familiar ego-defense: when the marketplace says no, the writer upgrades the audience to an imaginary tribunal of the future. It’s a deliciously self-serving pivot, a way to reframe failure as misunderstood greatness. Ade isn’t mocking ambition so much as the flimsy rhetoric that often props it up.

The mechanics matter. “Turned Down” is capitalized like a proper noun, as if rejection were a formal institution, a club with membership cards. “Numerous” adds bureaucratic weight, suggesting the author’s stack of refusal letters is so large it becomes evidence in his own mythmaking. Then comes “Posterity,” also capitalized, grand and bloodless, the ultimate editor who can’t send notes, can’t demand revisions, can’t ask for a tighter third act. It’s the perfect audience because it’s permanently unavailable.

As a playwright and humorist working in the churn of turn-of-the-century American publishing and popular entertainment, Ade knew the brutal calculus of taste: gatekeepers reward what sells now, not what might endure. The subtext is less romantic than it sounds. “Writing for Posterity” can be noble, but it can also be a way to dodge the humiliations of craft, compromise, and audience. Ade’s cynicism lands because it recognizes the human need to transform public indifference into private destiny.