Not many authors have the luxury of leaving school and getting stuck straight into a successful literary career. In fact, most authors had to do a “day” job for a long time before earning any kind of a living from writing. Of course, writing requires inspiration, and where better to draw this inspiration from than the real, working world?
For those literary trivia lovers out there, here is a list of what they were before they were famous writers, some of the (often odd) jobs that our prized authors have enjoyed along their road to success. As you head out to face the daily grind, may this offer inspiration to you all!
Dr. Seuss: ad writer
Stephen King: high school janitor
John Grisham: nursery worker, plumbing contractor, and attorney
George Orwell: officer of the Burmese Indian Imperial Police
Harper Lee: airline ticket agent
Arthur Conan Doyle: medical officer on a steamship
Charles Dickens: lawyer’s clerk
John Steinbeck: fruit picker, caretaker, painter, tour guide at a fish hatchery, and construction worker
Anthony Trollope: postal inspector
Margaret Atwood: counter girl in a coffee shop
Jack London: canner, gold prospector, and “oyster pirate”
Douglas Adams: hospital porter, barn builder, chicken shed cleaner, hotel security guard, and bodyguard for a family of oil tycoons
Joseph Conrad: gunrunner and political conspiracist
Herman Melville: cruise liner cabin boy
Ken Kesey: voluntary CIA psych test participant
James Joyce: singer and pianist
Kurt Vonnegut: car dealership manager
Haruki Murakami: record store assistant, Tokyo coffeehouse and jazz bar owner
J. D. Salinger: entertainment director on a luxury cruise ship
William S. Burroughs: exterminator
T. S. Eliot: bank clerk
Jorge Luis Borges: librarian
Joseph Heller: blacksmith’s apprentice, messenger, and filing clerk
Nicholas Sparks: real estate appraiser, waiter, and dental products salesman
Mary Higgins Clark: secretary
J. K. Rowling: teacher of English as a second language
Dan Brown: high school English teacher
Henry David Thoreau: handyman, vegetable seller, tutor, and teacher
William Faulkner: postmaster and screenwriter
Robert Frost: newspaper boy, teaching assistant, and light-bulb factory worker
Jonathan Franzen: lab assistant
Ralph Waldo Emerson: assistant in a school for young women, minister, and lecturer
Jack Kerouac: gas station attendant, cotton picker, night watchman, dishwasher, construction worker, deckhand, and railroad brakeman
Langston Hughes: busboy
Emma Codd