PRPG:
Herman Melville

4 Famous Writers…and Their Day Jobs

September 12, 2016

There are a lot of rich and famous writers of course, but not every writer that became famous became rich. Here are some well-known writers who kept at the daily grind, either because they wanted to or to make ends meet.
Herman Melville

Herman Melville

Melville gained popularity through the 1840s for a series of sea-based adventure novel. His work got more complex and symbolic as he went on, culminating in 1851 with the sea-based, complex and symbolic Moby Dick. It was a commercial flop, to the point where it killed Melville’s career. He suffered a nervous breakdown, but soon after found a job as a customs inspector at the docs in New York City. He worked there for 22 years and died in 1891. Melville kept writing during his free time, and many of his novels were published after his death, including Billy Budd, which reignited interest in his work—especially Moby Dick).

T.S. Eliot

With works such as The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Eliot was one of the most popular and influential poets in the stark Modernist style of the early 20th century. But poetry doesn’t pay much, and neither did being a prominent critic of poetry. So, for eight years he worked in the foreign transactions department in Lloyds Bank of London.

Lewis Carroll

“Lewis Carroll” was a pen name invented by Charles Dodgson so as to have a separate identity under which he could write surreal children’s books (such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) and bizarre, almost nonsensical poetry (“Jabberwocky.”). That’s because Dodgson had quite a sedate, “normal” life with a normal job to protect: He was a math professor at Oxford, and a high-ranking official in the Church of England.

Toni Morrison

In 1964, Morrison took a job as a textbook editor at Random House, later promoted to a fiction editor. All the while she was publishing her own work with a different subsidiary of Random House. She stayed working behind the scenes in publishing (and getting up before dawn to write for years) until 1977, when she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon. In 1993, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature.