Well, if you read Swedish, anyway. Larsson applied to the Joint Colleges of Journalism in Stockholm in 1972, at the age of 18, and after being rejected, went on to work as a photographer, eventually ending up as the editor of Trotskyist paper Fjärde Internationalen. His subsequent journalistic career — and, of course, his wildly successful posthumous novels — make the people who rejected him look rather silly, and Larsson apparently kept the letter as a sort of motivation over the years. His brother Joakim told the Guardian in England that although Larsson wasn’t bitter about the rejection, “of course he was not happy.” The letter’s being sold at Sotheby’s in London as part of a fund-raiser for Expo, the magazine that Larsson founded (and which bears a striking resemblance to Millenium, the fictional magazine in his novels.) You can see it after the jump — does anyone want to translate it for us?
[via Guardian]