The next time Mary Morris tells her writing students about the value of rejection, she can use her new book, "The Jazz Palace," as an invaluable object lesson.

"I tell them that rejection is a terrible thing to go through," she said in a phone interview. "But if you use it well, it forces you to think about what you're doing."

Take "The Jazz Palace." Over the course of more than a decade, no publisher would. What would become a panoramic "love letter to Chicago," began life in 1997 as a memoir about her "old and unusual bed," Morris said. This piece of family history involved her father, then 20, his father, a...