List of Day Jobs of Famous Writers

• Edward Abbey: Park ranger

The author of both nonfiction and fiction classics of the American environmental movement, including Desert Solitaire (1968) and The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), Edward Abbey worked as a park ranger and fire lookout for the National Park Service after college. His experience gave him extensive, intimate knowledge of the southwestern United States, shaping his writing, which explored such themes as the sublime and forbidding wilderness and human encroachment on nature.

• Louisa May Alcott: Potboiler writer

Louisa May Alcott’s father, Bronson Alcott, was a Transcendentalist and a utopian dreamer whose grand plans left him unable to provide for his wife and children. This meant that Louisa, the family’s second oldest child, was no stranger to work. At various times she was a teacher, nurse, and domestic servant, and she also wrote potboilers—lurid, violent tales that were the polar opposite of her heartwarming American classic Little Women (1868–69). Like her potboilers, Little Women was written for money—but unlike her steamier works, it was published under her own name.

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• Maya Angelou: Streetcar conductor

Maya Angelou, author of the powerful memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), worked many different jobs while living in San Francisco in the 1940s. For a brief period she was one of the city’s first Black streetcar conductors. Angelou was 15 years old but said she was 19 on the job application. She wrote about her experience in her memoir: “I learned to fill out work cards, operate the money changer and punch transfers.”

• Margaret Atwood: Barista

In 1962 Margaret Atwood, then a college student on summer break in Toronto, began working at a coffee shop in a small hotel. She was assured the job would be “easy as pie,” but she often found herself struggling with a cash register with a mind of its own. Atwood quit and went on to write such celebrated works as the feminist dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).

• Eve Babitz: Album cover designer

Eve Babitz was the Hollywood-raised queen of southern California counterculture, known for such freewheeling memoirs and novels as Eve’s Hollywood (1972) and Slow Days, Fast Company (1974). She was also a collage artist and photographer who designed album covers for seminal rock music acts of the 1960s and ’70s, including Buffalo Springfield, Linda Ronstadt, and the Byrds.

• James Baldwin: Teenage preacher

A master of piercing prose, James Baldwin was born in Harlem and influenced by his stepfather, a Baptist minister, to become a preacher. From age 14 to 17 Baldwin preached outside school hours in a small Pentecostal church. He eventually abandoned preaching but later wrote about this period in his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), and in his play about a woman evangelist, The Amen Corner (1954). Baldwin also credited his early preaching days with influencing his searing use of language.

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• Wendell Berry and Isak Dinesen: Farmers

As a poet, novelist, and essayist, Wendell Berry is one of the great modern voices of agrarian values. He grew up in rural Kentucky and worked on his father’s farm. Though his college studies took him to California and Italy, followed by a teaching job at New York University, he decided to return to Kentucky and dedicate himself to small-scale farming.

Isak Dinesen (the pseudonym of Karen Blixen) was raised in Denmark but moved to Kenya with her husband to run a coffee plantation. After their divorce in 1921, she stayed to manage the plantation for a decade before returning to Denmark. Her experiences became the basis for her memoir Out of Africa (1937).

• Charlotte Brontë: Governess

English author Charlotte Brontë’s most famous novel, Jane Eyre (1847), centers on a young orphan who eventually finds work as a governess, a job that introduces her to the dashing, brooding Mr. Rochester (her employer, no less). Many aspects of the book were inspired by Brontë’s life, including her months working as a governess to help pay her brother Branwell’s debts.

• Charles Bukowski and Richard Wright: Postal workers

American poet and novelist Charles Bukowski had a wide range of menial jobs before finding success as a writer later in life. For more than a decade he worked as a mail carrier and postal clerk. He captured the drudgery of a steady-job lifestyle in his autobiographical novel Post Office (1971), told through the eyes of Bukowski’s alter ego, the hard-drinking Hank Chinaski.

Richard Wright’s postal stint was much shorter; from 1927 to 1930 he worked as a letter sorter in Chicago, before an opportunity came along to write through the Federal Writers’ Project. In due time Wright produced the novel Native Son (1940) and his compelling autobiography, Black Boy (1945).

• William S. Burroughs: Exterminator

Naked Lunch (1962) author William S. Burroughs was the grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine and studied archaeology and ethnology at Harvard University. But his résumé was as offbeat as his writing. Among the jobs he held when he was young was a door-to-door exterminator in Chicago.

• Octavia Butler: Potato chip inspector

Science fiction novelist Octavia Butler’s acclaimed works include Kindred (1979), The Parable of the Sower (1993), and Fledgling (2005). In 1995 she became the first sci-fi writer to win a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” But for years she labored in obscurity, often waking at 2 a.m. to write while supporting herself with such day jobs as telemarketer, dishwasher, and inspector of potato chips.

• Can Xue: Tailor

Avant-garde Chinese writer Can Xue (the pen name of Deng Xiaohua) did not begin writing until she was 30. The daughter of intellectual parents who were sent away for re-education during the political purges before the Cultural Revolution, she was mostly self-educated. She worked as a factory worker, teacher, and “barefoot doctor” (a local doctor with very basic health care training) before opening a tailoring shop with her husband. Can wrote her first novella, Yellow Mud Street (1987), at her sewing machine in between taking care of customers.

• Baldassare Castiglione: Courtier

The son of Italian nobles, Baldassare Castiglione was a true Renaissance man. His main claim to fame was writing a book of etiquette based on his experience as a courtier, a person who serves as an attendant to a king, queen, or other member of a royal family. The Book of the Courtier (1528) is framed as a discussion of the qualities of the ideal courtier between Castiglione’s real-life friends and claims to represent conversations at the court of Urbino (in which he served) on four successive evenings in 1507. The book was an instant smash and became a classic of Italian literature.

• Miguel de Cervantes: Soldier

The author of Don Quixote (1605, 1615), one of the great works of Spanish literature, Miguel de Cervantes enlisted as a soldier in the Spanish infantry in 1570. His military adventures include a battle at sea in which he was shot three times. In 1575 Cervantes was on board a ship to Spain (and planning to leave the army) when he was captured by pirates and sold into slavery in Algiers. After gaining freedom five years later, he would spend most of the rest of his life as a civil servant who was constantly short of money. Success finally came with Don Quixote, a novel about a knight-errant whose adventures are inspired by the author’s earlier days.

• Agatha Christie: Pharmacist

“Queen of Mysteries” Agatha Christie killed off her characters in all kinds of ways, especially death by poison. During World War I she trained as a pharmacy assistant, and her knowledge was put to good use in her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), as well as many of her other mysteries, such as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Murder Is Easy (1938), and And Then There Were None (1939).

• Colette: Music hall performer

French writer Colette began writing at the command of her husband, Henri (“Willy”) Gauthier-Villars, who literally locked her in a room to produce her four beloved “Claudine” novels. The Claudine series is based on Colette’s girlhood and her days as a young bride, but Willy published them under his own name. Unsurprisingly, she eventually left him, but he kept her publishing royalties. The ever-resourceful Colette took a job as a music hall performer, which inspired her books The Vagabond (1910) and Music-Hall Sidelights (1913).

• Dante: Prior

Born in Florence, Italy, into a family of moneylenders, Dante took a different career path, becoming a writer and involving himself in Florentine politics. In 1300 he was elected prior, a high-ranking position in the court system. In a time when Italy—plus the Roman Catholic Church—was rife with factionalism, a political job was risky. Indeed, Dante was exiled after a sham trial convicting him of corruption. Bitter to the end, he turned his anger into The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–21), a poetic masterpiece that traces his fictional journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.

• Don DeLillo and Salman Rushdie: Advertising copywriters

Two of the most acclaimed novelists of the later 20th and early 21st centuries are American author Don DeLillo and Indian-born writer Salman Rushdie. Devoted fan bases and critical praise aren’t the only things they have in common. Both DeLillo and Rushdie started out working as advertising copywriters. Also belonging to the former copywriter club are Australian writer Peter Carey, U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón, and American author Amy Tan.

• Arthur Conan Doyle and William Carlos Williams: Doctors

Like Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle drew from professional experience in crafting his mysteries. Doyle attended medical school in Edinburgh and worked as a ship’s physician and general practitioner in England. The famed deductive reasoning and forensic skills of his literary detective were modeled on the uncanny observational skills of Doyle’s professor, Dr. Joseph Bell.

Poet William Carlos Williams received his M.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and did graduate study in pediatrics in Germany before setting up a practice in New Jersey. Meanwhile, he wrote poems that put him at the forefront of the Imagist movement. Williams’ gift for turning the ordinary into the extraordinary was inspired by his interactions with his patients. He often wrote poems on blank prescriptions or between patient visits.

• Paul Laurence Dunbar: Elevator operator

Poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the first African American writers to achieve national fame and the first to make a concerted attempt to live by his writing. In 1893 he self-published his first book, a collection of poems titled Oak and Ivy. Dunbar supported himself and his art by working as an elevator operator in his home city of Dayton, Ohio, and he helped pay for the printing of his collection by selling copies to his passengers.

• T.S. Eliot: Bank clerk

In 1917 poet T.S. Eliot began working a roughly nine-to-five clerk’s job, five to six days a week, at Lloyds Bank in London. Hired in the foreign transactions department, Eliot toiled at a desk in the bank’s basement. When he finally left Lloyds, it was not because he’d become famous with the publication of his Modernist masterwork, The Waste Land, in 1922. No, he stayed on three more years until a bout of influenza (no doubt picked up in the drafty depths of Lloyds) caused him to take a leave of absence. Eliot’s coworkers kindly signed a memo wishing him well until he was fit to return. Instead, he got a job as an editor and director at a new publishing firm that would become Faber & Faber.

• Louise Erdrich and Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Bookstore owners

Owning a bookstore seems like a natural choice for someone who writes books for a living. Among the writers who’ve gone this route is Louise Erdrich, whose Birchbark Books in Minneapolis specializes in selling books, art, and crafts by Native artists. The store was the setting for the haunted bookstore in her 2021 novel The Sentence.

Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti cofounded City Lights Pocket Book Shop in San Francisco in 1953. His store became a gathering place for local avant-garde writers, including the Beats, and the publishing arm of City Lights was the first to print Beat classics such as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956).

• William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez: Screenwriters

American novelist William Faulkner had already written his great works The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) when financial need made him accept Hollywood screenwriting assignments throughout the 1930s and ’40s. He deplored the work, but it paid him well. Among the movie scripts Faulkner contributed to are those for To Have and Have Not (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Big Sleep (1946).

Another literary giant who wrote screenplays was Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). As a young journalist, he wrote influential film criticism. Then in 1954 he wrote and codirected a surrealist short film, La langosta azul (The Blue Lobster). A year later García Márquez enrolled in film school in Rome, where he was mentored by Cesare Zavattini, who wrote the script for the classic 1948 film The Bicycle Thief. García Márquez ended up leaving film school to move to Mexico City, but he wrote many screenplays (along with his famous novels of magical realism) to the end of his life.

• Tana French: Archaeologist

“First Lady of Irish Crime” Tana French studied drama and English literature at Trinity College Dublin in the early 1990s and then pursued a career acting in plays and doing voice-over work. In between acting gigs she worked on an archaeological dig, which inspired her third—and best-known—career. During the dig French noticed a nearby stand of woods and had an idea for a mystery story in which three children enter the woods but only one comes out. The story became her first novel, In the Woods (2007).

• Ernest Hemingway: Ambulance driver

During World War I American writer Ernest Hemingway, then only 18 years old, tried to enlist but was rejected because of an impaired eye. His chance to serve came with a call for volunteers for the American Red Cross ambulance service. He was sent to Europe, where he was injured on the Austro-Italian front. While hospitalized in Milan, he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who declined his marriage proposal. These experiences were fictionalized in his seminal novel A Farewell to Arms (1929).

• Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Martin: Priests

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Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English poet celebrated for such poems as “Pied Beauty” and “God’s Grandeur” and his invention of sprung rhythm verse. He was also a Jesuit priest. Raised an Anglican, Hopkins converted to Roman Catholicism while a student at the University of Oxford. After deciding to become a priest, Hopkins burned all his poems and vowed to give up writing, but his Jesuit superior, as well as his own study of Welsh language and literature, encouraged him to return to his art. He was ordained in 1877 and died in 1889, after which his intensely spiritual poems were discovered and acclaimed by a new generation.

Fellow Jesuit James Martin studied economics at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business. While in college he worked as an usher in a movie theater among other odd jobs. From business school, Martin went on to work at General Electric. After encountering the life and writing of Trappist monk Thomas Merton, he decided to quit the corporate world and become a priest. Martin was ordained in 1999 and began working full-time as an editor at America, a Jesuit magazine. His many books include his memoir, Work in Progress: Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Bank Teller, Corporate Tool, and Priest (2026). “I love writing,” he told Britannica in 2025. “I feel like it’s a vocation within a vocation.”

• Zora Neale Hurston: Anthropologist

Hailed as “A Genius of the South” by fellow writer Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston was born in Alabama but raised in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-Black town in the United States. She studied anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University and did fieldwork in folklore among African Americans in the South. All of this experience fed her writing, including novels such as Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and the nonfiction work Mules and Men (1935), a study of the folkways of African Americans in Florida.

• Omar Khayyam: Astronomer

Omar Khayyam, a Persian poet who lived in the 11th and 12th centuries, is known to most English-speaking readers through Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859), a translation of Khayyam’s robāʿīyāt (“quatrains”). But Khayyam was also a renowned mathematician and astronomer in what is now Iran. After an education in science and philosophy, he produced an important algebra treatise that got him invited by the sultan Malik-Shāh to work on a reform of the calendar. Based on Khayyam’s astronomical observations, a new calendar was produced, known as the Jalālī calendar, that was more accurate than the Gregorian calendar used today.

• Stephen King: High school janitor

Horror master Stephen King honed his craft early in his career by writing short stories while making a meager income as a teacher, industrial laundry worker, and high school janitor. It was the last of these jobs that partly inspired his breakthrough work, the 1974 novel Carrie, about a bullied teenage girl with telekinetic powers.

• László Krasznahorkai: Night watchman of cows

Novelist and 2025 Nobel laureate for literature László Krasznahorkai studied law, philology, and Hungarian literature before spending years wandering Hungary and Germany and working odd jobs. Perhaps the oddest was a night watchman of cows. He was also a miner, editor, and pianist in a jazz band. These picaresque experiences found their way into many of his experimental novels.

• Fran Lebowitz: Cab driver

Writer, wit, and raconteur, Fran Lebowitz aspired to the literary life at a young age. After being expelled from her New Jersey prep school for “nonspecific surliness,” she moved to New York City, settled in Manhattan, and spent a few years as a struggling artist. Her jobs at this time included selling belts on the street, writing pornography (she even published a book “under the name of the headmaster who threw me out of school”), and driving a cab.

• Harper Lee: Airline ticket agent

Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is one of the most famous works of American literature. She based the novel’s hero, the noble lawyer Atticus Finch, on her father and even studied law herself (but didn’t earn a degree). After moving to New York City from Alabama, Lee worked as a reservationist for an airline. In 1956 two friends gave her enough money to allow her to write full-time. The short stories she produced eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird.

• Min Jin Lee: Corporate lawyer

In 2007 Min Jin Lee published her first novel, the acclaimed Free Food for Millionaires. It came more than a decade after quitting her job as a corporate lawyer. Lee studied history at Yale University, before earning her law degree from Georgetown University. She then spent nearly two years working as a lawyer, before health issues forced her to quit. In 2024 Lee told Britannica, “I think I might still be a lawyer if it wasn’t for the fact that I had this liver disease. I enjoyed being a lawyer.” So she turned to writing a novel, all the while building her own version of an M.F.A. program through workshops and local arts resources.

• Jack London: Oyster pirate

If there was a prize for the most colorful career in literary history, it might reasonably go to The Call of the Wild (1903) author Jack London (or Beryl Markham; see below). The son of an astrologer (who abandoned him early on) and a spiritualist, London lived quite an adventurous life. When he was 14, he left home to live in San Francisco and supported himself by poaching oysters and working for the government fish patrol. Later, he was at various times a sailor, a hobo, and a militant socialist. He educated himself by reading books in libraries and went to Canada to find his fortune (he didn’t) in the Klondike gold rush. After all this he began writing, producing (no surprise) classic adventure tales such as The Sea-Wolf (1904) and White Fang (1906).

• Beryl Markham: Aviator

Was Beryl Markham a writer who flew planes or an aviator who wrote? Likely the latter, given that her best-known work, the lyrical memoir West with the Night (1942), may have been written with the help of others. What is certain is that Markham was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west (1936). English-born but raised in British East Africa, she hunted with local tribesmen and spoke several African dialects. At age 18 she became the first woman in Africa to receive a racehorse-trainer’s license and eventually trained six Kenya Derby winners.

• Colleen McCullough: Neuroscientist

Best known for her best-selling romance novel The Thorn Birds (1977), Australian writer Colleen McCullough studied neurophysiology at the University of Sydney and later founded a neurophysiology unit at the university’s affiliated hospital. Her career took her to England, where she earned a master’s degree from the University of London, and then to the United States, where she taught in the neurology department at the Yale School of Medicine for nearly a decade. During this time she began writing to supplement her income and produced her first novel Tim (1974).

• Haruki Murakami: Jazz café owner

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, author of such novels as Norwegian Wood (1987), studied Greek drama at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met his wife. Wanting to avoid a nine-to-five office job and “company life,” the couple opened a jazz café in the suburbs of Tokyo in 1974, one year before Murakami graduated. Then in 1978 he was watching a baseball game when he had an epiphany: “I think I can write a novel.” His first book, Hear the Wind Sing, was published the following year.

• Vladimir Nabokov: Butterfly expert

Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov was a published poet before emigrating from Russia to England in 1919. He studied zoology at Trinity College, Cambridge, before switching to French and Russian literature. After graduating, he continued to write poetry but eventually turned to fiction. Until the publication of Lolita in 1955, Nabokov’s novels mainly paid for his butterfly-hunting expeditions, a lifelong passion. He eventually published other great works such as Pale Fire (1962) and 18 scientific papers on entomology.

• Jo Nesbø: Stockbroker

Mystery writer Jo Nesbø, creator of the popular Harry Hole series, graduated from the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen and worked as a stockbroker. By night he performed in a pop-rock band. His double-duty lifestyle took its toll, and he decided to take a six-month break in Australia. He returned with what would become his first Harry Hole novel, The Bat (1997).

• Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain: IRA members

Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain were masters of the short story who were born in Cork, Ireland, at the beginning of the 20th century. Both men also found a mentor in nationalist writer Daniel Corkery and joined the Irish Republican Army (IRA) after the Easter Rising of 1916. O’Connor was briefly imprisoned for his IRA activity and later worked as a librarian and served as director of the Abbey Theatre. O’Faolain grew disillusioned with the cause for Irish independence and became a teacher and editor, and had a stint as director of the Arts Council of Ireland.

• Frank O’Hara and Kevin Young: Curators

Frank O’Hara, a leading voice in the so-called New York School of poets of the mid-20th century, summed up the style of his vibrant poetry as: “I do this I do that.” He made writing poems look easy (though, of course, it isn’t) even as he held down a job as an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, despite his lack of formal art training. Indeed, he began at MoMA as the information desk clerk.

Another poet turned curator and museum professional is Kevin Young. Hired as The New Yorker’s poetry editor in 2017, he has published many of his own collections themed around the arts, especially African American music and culture. Before starting at The New Yorker, he taught at Emory University, where he was curator of the university’s poetry library. Then in 2020 Young was named the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, a role he held until 2025.

• Chuck Palahniuk: Bike messenger and truck mechanic

Known for his disturbing and darkly comic novels, in particular the cult classic Fight Club (1996), Chuck Palahniuk worked a series of odd jobs such as movie projectionist and bike messenger after getting his bachelor’s degree in journalism. He made a brief foray into that field but decided the pay was too low and the competition too high to continue. Instead, for 13 years Palahniuk worked as a documentation specialist and diesel mechanic for a truck company in Portland, Oregon, before writing full time.

• Arthur Rimbaud: Coffee trader

Most of the people on this list worked nonliterary jobs before becoming a successful writer. French poet Arthur Rimbaud did it the other way around. The epitome of an enfant terrible, Rimbaud was a rebellious adolescent with a tempestuous personal life (ask fellow poet Paul Verlaine). He published his magnum opus, A Season in Hell (1873), when he was only 19 but soon gave up writing poetry. His post-literary life was full of adventure. Rimbaud became a coffee trader and went to Ethiopia. He turned one of his expeditions into a report that was published by France’s National Society of Geography in 1884.

• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Nun

As her name suggests (Sor means “Sister” in Spanish), the brilliant 17th-century Mexican poet, dramatist, and scholar Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was also a Roman Catholic nun. Having no interest in marriage and wishing “to have no fixed occupation which might curtail my freedom to study,” she first joined the strict Discalced Carmelites before taking her vows with the more-relaxed Hieronymite order in Mexico City, where she remained cloistered in a convent for the rest of her life. Sor Juana’s writings include a famous defense of women’s right to education, Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz (1691; “Reply to Sister Filotea of the Cross”).

• J.D. Salinger: Cruise ship entertainment director

J.D. Salinger, best known for that stalwart of high-school reading The Catcher in the Rye (1951), had already published short stories in magazines when he began his brief but glorious career as an entertainment director on a cruise ship. In early 1941 Salinger and a friend were hired for a 19-day Caribbean cruise on the luxury liner Kungsholm, operated by the Swedish American Line. Salinger’s duties included accompanying young women to dances, playing deck sports, and acting in plays. The following year would see him serving in World War II, but later his sunny cruise days found their way into a few of his short stories.

• Isaac Bashevis Singer: Rabbinical student

Named a Nobel laureate in 1978, Isaac Bashevis Singer came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of his family. He received a traditional Jewish education at the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary but chose the life of a writer, like his older brother, novelist I.J. Singer, and his sister, novelist and short-story writer Esther Kreitman. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s own fiction was remarkable for its rich depiction of Jewish life in his native Poland and the United States, his adopted country.

• Mark Twain: Riverboat pilot

American author Mark Twain certainly enjoyed his former profession as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi in the late 1850s and early 1860s. “A pilot, in those days,” he wrote in “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875), “was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.” Twain, who was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, even took his pen name from the job. The nautical term mark twain means water that is found to be two fathoms (12 feet [3.7 meters]) deep, as in mark (measure) twain (two).

• Wallace Stevens: Insurance executive

“What! Wally a poet?” Such was the reaction of an insurance colleague of Wallace Stevens after learning of “Wally’s” second career in poetry. Stevens worked at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in Connecticut for nearly 40 years, rising to the rank of vice president. He also was the winner of the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Stevens liked to compose poems on the walk from his home to the office. As for which took precedence, poetry or the insurance biz, he once told The New York Times, “I prefer to think I’m just a man, not a poet part time, business man the rest.…I don’t divide my life, just go on living.”

• Mario Vargas Llosa: Presidential candidate

A major figure in 20th-century Latin American literature, Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature. Twenty years earlier, however, the author of such novels as The Time of the Hero (1963) was running for president of Peru. He lost in a runoff against agricultural engineer Alberto Fujimori. Vargas Llosa wrote about his political run in A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (1993) and later told The Guardian, “I learned from my political experiences that I am a writer, not a politician.…My best adventures are more literary than political.”

• Kurt Vonnegut: Car salesman

In the late 1950s Kurt Vonnegut was raising a family in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and was a few years off from writing the novels that would make his reputation, such as Cat’s Cradle (1963) and, especially, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). To bring in some income, he took a chance on opening a Saab dealership. It didn’t last long. In his 2005 book A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut reflected, “The Saab then, as now, was a Swedish car, and I now believe my failure as a dealer so long ago explains what would otherwise remain a deep mystery: Why the Swedes have never given me a Nobel Prize for Literature.”

• Banana Yoshimoto: Waitress

Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto published her first novella, Moonlight Shadow (1986), as part of her graduation thesis for art school in Tokyo. She wrote her second book, the novella Kitchen (1988), while working as a waitress. Within a few years Kitchen was translated into Chinese and English, and she gained a following in the United States and England.