Some of the world’s greatest writers had to do their work while holding down a day job. William Faulkner and Anthony Trollope toiled as postal clerks. Zora Neal Hurston trained as an anthropologist. Vladimir Nabokov was a lepidopterist who curated a butterfly exhibit at Harvard. Literary historian Jack Lynch tells the stories of these and others in his new book, Don’t Quit Your Day Job: What the Famous Did That Wasn’t. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Great Writers’ Day Jobs”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Writing is really hard work. If you’re going to do it well, you need focus, you need passion, you need solitude, and you need lots and lots and lots of practice.
So it’s surprising to learn just how many of the greatest writers in the English language actually had to work other jobs when they were writing. I mean, it’s really amazing, Grant. And I’ve been reading about this in a new book by our friend Jack Lynch, who’s written about Samuel Johnson and lexicography and the history of lexicography.
He’s got a new book out that’s called Don’t Quit Your Day Job. And it’s about famous people in history who had day jobs while they were doing other things. And I really enjoyed it. It’s a light, easy read.
But a lot of the people that he talks about in the book, like, for example, Vladimir Nabokov was a highly regarded lepidopterist. You know, he was head for a while of the Butterfly and Moth Division of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Awesome. Isn’t that great? What a fantastic contrast that is.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he was quite the scientist. Faulkner was a postal clerk. And so is Anthony Trollope, by the way. And everyone always talks about Einstein when this comes up. He was a patent clerk, right? Right.
But it made me think about, even if you’re not a great writer, how did your jobs growing up affect the way that you write and see the world? So the stuff that you did as a child, right? Like I was a newspaper boy. That’s where I got the newspaper habit, reading the paper as I was folding them up to deliver them that day.
Oh, yeah. Interesting. Does your day job influence the way you write? We’d love to hear about it. Call us, 1-877-929-9673. And you can also call us if you want to talk about grammar, slang, punctuation, word origins, family phrases, and sayings. Or email us. That address is words@waywordradio.org.
