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Franz Kafka
Born
Franz Kafka worked at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague from 1908 until illness forced his retirement in 1922, writing reports on industrial accidents and safety equipment. He wrote fiction at night, complaining bitterly about the office in his diaries. Yet the bureaucracies, forms and impersonal authorities he dealt with daily run through The Trial and The Castle, and his employers valued him highly.
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Wallace Stevens
Born
Wallace Stevens joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in 1916, became a vice-president in 1934 and stayed until his death in 1955, even turning down a Harvard professorship. He composed poems while walking to the office and dictated them to his secretary. Many colleagues barely knew he wrote; he won the Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems in the year he died.
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William Carlos Williams
Born
William Carlos Williams practised as a family doctor and paediatrician in Rutherford, New Jersey, for some forty years, delivering thousands of babies. He wrote between appointments, sometimes on prescription pads, and his patients' speech fed his insistence on plain American language. Poems such as The Red Wheelbarrow and his long work Paterson are inseparable from that working town.
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T. S. Eliot
Born
T. S. Eliot worked in the foreign accounts department of Lloyds Bank in the City of London from 1917 to 1925, the years in which he wrote The Waste Land, published in 1922. He then joined the publisher Faber and Faber, where as an editor and director he published Auden, Spender and later Ted Hughes. Both jobs gave him financial security that his poetry alone never could.
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Philip Larkin
Born
Philip Larkin was librarian of the University of Hull from 1955 until his death in 1985, overseeing the building of its new library and greatly expanding its collections. His poetry, collected in The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, was written in the evenings and is full of the routines of work and ordinary life. His poem Toads weighs the job's burden against its security.
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Anthony Trollope
Born
Anthony Trollope worked for the Post Office for over thirty years, as a surveyor in Ireland and England, and is credited with introducing the pillar box to Britain. He wrote before breakfast to a strict timetable, a set number of words every fifteen minutes, producing the Barsetshire and Palliser novels. His travels as a postal official supplied the provincial detail that makes them so specific.
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Charles Ives
Born
Charles Ives built a highly successful insurance agency, Ives and Myrick, and wrote influential guides to selling life insurance and estate planning. He composed in the evenings and at weekends, producing experimental works such as the Concord Sonata and The Unanswered Question that few heard for decades. His Third Symphony won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, long after he had stopped composing.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne
Born
Nathaniel Hawthorne worked as surveyor of the Salem Custom House from 1846 until he lost the post in a change of administration in 1849. He then wrote The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, and opened it with a long, sardonic sketch called The Custom-House about his colleagues and the documents he claimed to find there. The job literally frames the novel.
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Herman Melville
Born
Herman Melville's novels had stopped selling by the 1860s, and from 1866 to 1885 he worked as a customs inspector on the New York docks, a steady but poorly paid post. In those years and after he wrote poetry, including the long poem Clarel, and in retirement began Billy Budd, left unfinished at his death and published only in 1924. The job kept his family afloat while his reputation sank.
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Lewis Carroll
Born
Charles Dodgson was a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, for more than twenty-five years, publishing on geometry, logic and voting systems. As Lewis Carroll he wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) for the daughters of the college's dean, and his love of logical puzzles and paradox runs through it. The college position gave him rooms, income and the photography he also pursued.
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Alexander Borodin
Born
Alexander Borodin was a professor of chemistry at the Medical-Surgical Academy in St Petersburg, with a reaction still named after him, and helped found medical courses for women. He called himself a Sunday composer, writing music when illness or holidays freed him from the lab. His opera Prince Igor, with the Polovtsian Dances, was left unfinished at his death and completed by friends.
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Anton Chekhov
Born
Anton Chekhov qualified as a doctor in 1884 and practised medicine for much of his life, often treating peasants for free and working through cholera outbreaks; he called medicine his lawful wife and literature his mistress. His early comic stories paid his family's bills. His clinical eye for symptoms and character shaped the stories and plays such as Uncle Vanya, in which a country doctor is a central figure.
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Bram Stoker
Born
Bram Stoker was a civil servant at Dublin Castle before becoming business manager of London's Lyceum Theatre for the actor Henry Irving, a post he held for about twenty-seven years. He handled finances, tours and correspondence, and wrote fiction in whatever time remained. Dracula (1897) owes something to the theatrical world he knew, and some biographers see Irving in the Count.
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Albert Einstein
Born
Albert Einstein could not get an academic post after graduating, so from 1902 to 1909 he examined applications at the Swiss patent office in Bern. In 1905, while working there full time, he published his papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion and special relativity. He later said the job's practical problems, many about electrical timing devices, helped his thinking. It also gave him steady pay.
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Henry Darger
Henry Darger worked for decades as a janitor and dishwasher in Chicago hospitals, living alone in a rented room. Only when he moved into a care home in 1972 did his landlord discover a 15,000-page illustrated novel, In the Realms of the Unreal, with hundreds of large watercolours. His case raises real questions about how unseen creative work by people with menial jobs is valued and interpreted.
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Vivian Maier
Born
Vivian Maier worked as a nanny and carer for families in New York and Chicago for some forty years, taking more than 100,000 photographs on her days off and walks with the children. Most were never printed in her lifetime. After negatives were bought at auction in 2007, her street photography was widely exhibited. The job gave her both the time on city streets and the anonymity that shaped her pictures.
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Charles Bukowski
Born
Charles Bukowski worked for more than a decade at the US Postal Service in Los Angeles, mostly as a letter-filing clerk, while writing poems for small magazines. In 1969 his publisher John Martin offered him a monthly stipend to quit, and he wrote his first novel, Post Office (1971), in weeks, drawing on the job. It is a clear case of a dull job becoming the material rather than an obstacle.
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Toni Morrison
Born
Toni Morrison was a senior editor at Random House from the late 1960s to 1983, championing Black writers such as Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones and editing Angela Davis's autobiography and The Black Book. She wrote her first novels, The Bluest Eye, Sula and Song of Solomon, early in the morning while working and raising two sons alone. Her editing shaped American publishing as much as her fiction did.
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Primo Levi
Born
Primo Levi, a trained chemist who survived Auschwitz partly because his skills were useful in its laboratory, spent some thirty years at the SIVA paint and varnish factory near Turin, rising to general manager before retiring in 1977. He wrote If This Is a Man and The Truce alongside the job. The Periodic Table (1975) turns chemical elements and factory problems into memoir and stories.
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Haruki Murakami
Born
Haruki Murakami and his wife ran a jazz bar, Peter Cat, in Tokyo from 1974 to 1981, borrowing money to open it. He wrote his first two novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, at the kitchen table after closing time. Running the bar gave him discipline and a feel for the jazz records that recur in his books, before he sold it to write full time.
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Philip Glass
Born
Philip Glass supported himself into his early forties as a plumber, furniture mover and New York taxi driver, running a moving company with the sculptor Richard Serra. Even after Einstein on the Beach (1976) was staged at the Metropolitan Opera, he went back to driving a cab because the production lost money. He has spoken plainly about how long a composing career took to pay.
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