Politics & Power Quote by Nora Roberts

Publishing loves to fetishize “voice,” but Nora Roberts is pointing to something cruder: gatekeeping disguised as taste. The sting in her line isn’t the rejection itself; it’s the conditional compliment. “Pretty good, but I was American” exposes an industry habit of treating nationality as a genre label, a signal of presumed sensibility. The work can be competent, even compelling, yet still fail an unspoken cultural test about what counts as “literary,” “serious,” or properly “ours.”

Her phrasing does a lot of work. “For over a year” establishes stamina, not a single bruising moment. “Continued to submit mss” sounds procedural, almost clerical, as if persistence is an administrative task. Then comes the pivot: the later letters “indicated the story was pretty good” - a near-admission that the market’s decision isn’t purely aesthetic. The dash before “the last few” and again before “but I was American” functions like a shrug with teeth: the rationale is so plainly absurd it doesn’t require embellishment.

The context matters. Roberts, who would become one of the most commercially successful novelists alive, is talking from the early stage where legitimacy is rationed by institutions with narrow ideas of audience and prestige. The subtext is less “I was misunderstood” than “the system is provincial while pretending to be cosmopolitan.” It’s also a quiet rebuttal to the myth that success is a straight line from merit to recognition; sometimes it’s a long detour around someone else’s bias, stamped and mailed back to you.