Jobs of Famous Writers

 

Just started a new job delivery driving to get a bit of an income. Still giving me enough time to write. So, I wondered what kind of jobs famous writers might have had to make ends meet. Here are a few:

JK Rowling – had several jobs before the arrival of Harry Potter, including working as a bilingual secretary and researcher at Amnesty International, for the Manchester Chamber of Commerce and in Portugal teaching English.

Stephen King – the prodigious horror/fantasy author once worked as a janitor in a school. His novel ‘Carrie’ was allegedly based on the said experiences.

Harper Lee – worked as an airline booking clerk before her famous Pulitzer Prize winning novel To Kill A Mockingbird took off.

Kurt Vonnegut – famed for works like Slaughterhouse-Five – one time opened a Saab dealership in Cape Cod with limited success. By his own account, he made a terrible salesman, but the lack of customers gave him time to write The Sirens of Titan. The dealership even inspired the character Dwayne Hoover in Breakfast of Champions.

Margaret Atwood – worked a coffee shop counter in Boston when she was 23. She found the coffee easy enough, but ‘the cash register was perverse’. Its drawers would open for no reason, or it would ring eerily taking on a life of it’s own.

Ann Cleeve – famed for crime fiction in the UK worked variously as a child care officer, women's refuge leader, bird observatory cook, and auxiliary coastguard – before going back to college and training to be a probation officer.

Picture AI Nightcafe - Authors having a coffee.