This is how the worlds great writers actually made a living.

(It
wasnt from their books)
Postal clerk. Poacher. Propagandist. And nine more extraordinary professions for writer.
May 20, 2017
Camilla Nelson, The Conversation
Its a lean time for writers, as arts funding shrinks on all sides, journalists are laid
off in droves, broadcasting budgets are slashed, and book publishing remains in a
state of seemingly unceasing upheaval.

It often seems as if the age of living by the pen may be brought to a close by an
increasingly rapacious approach to human affairs, interested only in hard numbers
and bottom lines. Australian writers Frank Moorhouse and Ben Eltham have
recently proposed several schemes to give writers a living wage to support their
work.

And so its timely to reflect on some of the strange, desperate and occasionally
dangerous ways in which writers have historically lived, if not always by their
pens, then at least on their wits. Heres twelve ways in which classics of western
literature were written.

Advertising
Unlike other activities, advertising continues to pay very well (though many
writers fear they may be required to sell their soul).

English crime writer Dorothy Sayers had a top floor office at Bensons advertising,
where she invented the Mustard Club, a fictional mustard-loving entity with half a
million real life subscribers in the UK, and also devised Just think what Toucan
do for Guinness.
Dorothy Sayers, apart from her contribution to crime fiction, gave the world
Guinness toucan campaign. Ben Sutherland/Flickr, CC BY

Peter Carey devised roof-tiling company Moniers well-known jingle, Top Cat in
Roof Tiles. Salman Rushdie spent many happy years at Ogilvy & Mather where
he came up with Look into the Mirror tomorrow youll like what you see for
the Daily Mirror. Don Delillo was also employed at Ogilvy & Mathers New York
office, but doesnt talk about it much.

Even F Scott Fitzgerald did time at Barron Colliers. Not only did he give us The
Great Gatsby, he also produced for the Muscatine Steam laundry in Muscatine,
Iowa We keep you clean in Muscatine.

Postal clerks
The postal service has provided a safe haven for many a writer. Anthony
Trollope wrote his novels for three hours every morning before going off to his day
job at the post office, which he kept for 33 years. Charles Bukowski also worked
for the postal service, and kept his job for ten years. (His first novel was
called Post Office and its protagonist was a postal clerk.)

William Faulkner was also a postmaster in Mississippi, but rather less good at
holding his job. His resignation letter famously read:
As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced
by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the
beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage
stamp.

Faulkner went on to work as a night manager in a power plant where he penned As

I Lay Dying in six or eight weeks, writing between the hours of midnight and 4
am.

Janitors and pest exterminators

Keseys One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest was inspired by CIA-backed mind
control experiments.

Ken Kesey was a night cleaner in a mental hospital. He also volunteered to be an

experimental guinea pig in a CIA-backed mind control study conducted under the
auspices of a front organisation at the Menlo Park facility. This experience gave
us One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.

Stephen King also did time as a janitor in a high school. William S

Burroughs worked as a pest exterminator in Chicago. Jack Kerouacs resume
includes stints as a cotton picker, a dishwasher, a night guard, and gas station
attendant.

Music transcription
Desperate writers, it seems, will do just about anything. Rousseau, with his books
banned, and patrons running scared, transcribed an estimated 9,000 pages of music
at six sols per page between 1770 and his death in 1778.

Poaching
 Jack London,
oyster pirate, 1914.

Jack London was famously an oyster poacher, though he preferred to call himself
an oyster pirate. Theres also an apocryphal tale that Shakespeare was forced to
flee Stratford when he was nabbed for poaching deer on the nearby Lucy estate,
leading to a life-long feud with the local lord.

Theres no doubt that Shakespeare was adept at turning a guinea where he could.
The Earl of Rutland paid no less than four pounds and eight shillings to
Shakespeare and his lead actor Richard Burbage (who also moonlighted as a
painter) to create a shield and write a motto so that Rutland could appear well
dressed at a tournament.

Shakespeare sent his money home to his very clever wife in Stratford, who slowly
bought up lots of farmland and cornered much of the local grain trade.

Academic
Many writers teach, but few do it for a career. David Lodge was Professor of
English, back in the day when academics didnt worry too much about things like
Excellence in Research evaluation, or applying for research council grants. JRR
Tolkien was Professor of Anglo Saxon at Oxford, producing definitive editions
of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf as well as his novels.

Robert Frost taught at Amherst and Vladimir Nabokov was Professor of Russian
Literature at Cornell. But not everybody agreed this was a good idea. When
Nabokov was up for a chair in literature at Harvard, the distinguished linguist
Roman Jakobson protested, Whats next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach
zoology?

Butterfly curator
Nabokovs first job on arrival in the United States was as the curator of
Lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard. He stayed there for
six years.

Butterflies collected by Vladimir Nabakov.

Propagandist
Its surprising how many writers have ended up on the murky side of politics. John
Buchan, perhaps most famously, earned 1,000 pounds a year as the Director of
the Ministry of Information, closely aligned to the War Propaganda Bureau
where HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, JB Priestly, and Ford Maddox Ford penned
paid and unpaid articles, pamphlets and leaflets including Conan Doyles To
Arms! (1914) and Fords When Blood is Their Argument (1915). Arnold
Bennett was head of British propaganda in France. Wells became Head of Enemy
Propaganda until a strange series of events led to his spectacular resignation.
George Orwell, who spent much of his life scraping money from wherever he
could, was employed in the service of the Imperial Police in Burma, an institution
he despised. On returning to London, he worked as a paid propagandist at the
BBC, broadcasting to India. It was the psychic pain of the arch enemy of mindless
patriotism serving as a wartime propagandist that gave us 1984.
Orwells 1984 was inspired by his work as a propagandist.

Doctors, lawyers and clergymen

Some writers have known from the start that there are better ways to make a
living. Henry Fielding was a Magistrate, but by refusing to take a shilling from a
man who would undoubtedly not have had another one left halved his portion of
what he called the dirtiest money on earth.

Jonathan Swift was the vicar of Laracor his congregation of just 15 leaving him
plenty of time to write, which he did, for the most part, in the glittering clubs of
London.

Anton Chekov, Somerset Maugham and Williams Carlos Williams were doctors.
So too was Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle set up a not very successful medical
practice in Portsmouth and famously penned A Study in Scarlet during the
interminable wait times between patients. He later set up as an ophthalmologist in
Upper Wimpole St, London, but claims that he never secured so much as a single
patient.

Cinema impressario
James Joyce scraped a living by teaching English in Trieste, while dreaming up
wild moneymaking schemes. With the help of Italian friends he opened the
Cinematograph Volta in Dublin, on Mary St, but couldnt stick to it for more than
seven months. He then planned to import Irish tweed to Trieste.

Ulysses would never have been written without the support of feminist publisher
Harriet Shaw Weaver, who, in February 1917, shortly after she published Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man in book form, gave Joyce an income of 200 a year to
support his work. Later Weaver created a trust fund, the interest from which gave
Joyce an income for life.

Airline ticketing clerk

Harper Lee worked as a reservation clerk for Eastern Air Lines and BOAC for
more than eight years. This only changed in in 1956, when the Broadway
composer Michael Brown and his wife Joy gave Lee a Christmas gift with a card
that said, You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Lee
produced the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird within 12 months.
Harper Lee being presented with a medal of freedom by President George W Bush
in 2007.

Patronage
Its hard to believe, but writers made nothing from their books until the invention
of copyright in the 18th century. Instead, they relied on wealthy patrons to make a
living.

This uneasy relationship led a frustrated Samuel Johnson to insert in 1755 a

double-edged definition in his Dictionary. After the words, Patron: One who
countenances, supports and protects, he added, Commonly a wretch who
supports with insolence and is paid with flattery.

Shakespeare is said to have received an astonishing 1,000 for his flowery

dedications to the Earl of Southampton (though it was more probably a still wildly
generous 100). Hence he wrote, The love I dedicate to your lordship is without
end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety.

But choosing a patron could be dangerous. The Earl of Southampton was later
imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth I for his role in the Earl of Essexs 1601 rebellion
against the queen. Southampton had organised a special performance of Richard II.
While there is no evidence Shakespeare was directly punished, he had good reason
to be worried, with other writers tortured and even murdered in Elizabethan
England.

Living by the pen

Of course, the preferred method of earning an income for writers has inevitably
been journalism. Once patronage was replaced by the rise of the commercial press,
writers were able to turn to the business of writing about real people. Samuel
Richardson was a printer. Samuel Taylor Coleridge edited The Watchman and The
Friend. Charles Dickens was a parliamentary reporter and then editor and
publisher of Household Words.
Harriet Beecher Stowes work as a journalist allowed her to write, and support her
entire family

Indeed, writing for periodicals was what allowed many women in the 19th century
to secure an independent income. Jane Austen calculated that the life-long return
on her novels was a mere 84 and 13 shillings (works that made millions in the
centuries that followed).

But Harriet Beecher Stowe was able to become the sole income earner for her
family, penning not just Uncle Toms Cabin, but periodicals, gift books, textbooks
and popular annuals. Margaret Fuller became the first female editor of the New
York Tribune, and their first female foreign correspondent covering the Italian
revolutions.

Today, the problem is that not only writers but also perhaps journalists could use
an arts council grant.

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