10 real rejection letters successful people have received

Best-selling author J.K. Rowling recently tweeted that she pinned her first rejection letter to her kitchen wall because it gave her something in common with her favorite writers.

Before her Harry Potter series sold more than 450 million copies, won innumerable awards, was made into a hit movie franchise, and transformed Rowling's life, she lived in a cramped apartment with her daughter, jobless and penniless, and felt like the biggest failure she knew.

She has said she received "loads" of rejections from book publishers when she first sent out her "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" manuscript. "I wasn't going to give up until every single publisher turned me down, but I often feared that would happen," she recently tweeted.

In 1997, Bloomsbury, a publishing house in London, finally gave her book the green light. She added the "K" to her pen name (for Kathleen, her paternal grandmother) at the publisher's request, since women's names were found to be less appealing to the target audience of young boys - and three days after the Harry Potter book was published in the UK, Scholastic bid $100,000 for the American publishing rights, an unprecedented amount for a children's book at the time.

She is now one of the world's top-earning authors.

Rowling isn't the only successful person to receive heart-wrenching rejection letters. C.S. Lewis received 800 rejections before he sold his first piece of writing, and Mary Higgins Clark spent six years trying to get her first novel published, which she sold for $100. Forty years after that first novel, Clark accepted a $64 million book deal with Simon Schuster in the 1990s.

Below are 10 rejection letters that now-famous people once received:

Vivian Giang contributed to an earlier version of this story.