The tepid response from some publishers marks another blow to Allen’s career and legacy. Allen is currently locked in a court battle with Amazon. The streaming giant scotched their four-movie deal, which included the now-shelved film “A Rainy Day in New York,” and in response, Allen sued the company for at least $68 million. In a court filing, Amazon cited tone-deaf remarks Allen made about the #MeToo movement, along with public statements from several actors who said they regretted working with him as evidence that it would be impossible to profit from Allen’s work.

The break with Amazon and the lack of interest in his memoir from several major publishers highlight how tenuous his once hallowed position has become. “Personally, I don’t foresee any work in his future,” said Tim Gray, senior vice president and the awards editor at Variety, the entertainment industry trade publication. “However, it’s possible that history will be kinder to Woody Allen than the current moment seems to be.” He added that “Hollywood loves comeback stories; Ingrid Bergman, Charlie Chaplin and Elizabeth Taylor were each denounced on the floor of Congress for their private lives, but were eventually welcomed with open arms by Hollywood and the public.”

Allen is known for work inflected with literary and philosophical references, and he has a long track record in publishing. He began his career as a comedy writer. As a teenager, he got a job writing jokes for an advertising agency in New York, and, in the 1960s, he began publishing satirical pieces in The New Yorker. He contributed 44 pieces to the magazine over the decades, and last wrote for them in 2013.

His first book, the humor anthology “Getting Even,” was released in 1971 by Random House, and the publisher put out several more of his books, including “Without Feathers” and “Side Effects.” Even when much of the material was recycled, his books often found an eager, if not enormous, audience. (His 2007 humor collection, “Mere Anarchy,” sold more than 40,000 copies in print, according to NPD BookScan.)

Critics were not always kind. Reviewing “Mere Anarchy,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times that “he has sustained a writing style that remains impervious to the changing world around him” and added that “the best of Allen’s old pieces outshine the new work.” A reviewer for The Guardian groused that “even in the smallest doses, these lazy riffs and lame parodies do more to annoy than entertain.”

Although several biographers have tackled Allen as a subject, he has never published a straightforward memoir. In 2003, Allen was close to a deal to sell a memoir to Penguin for about $3 million, but Allen held out for more money. “For this I want a lot of money. The ball is in your court,” Mr. Allen wrote in a letter to his agent that was sent around as a proposal.