Who Wants to Employ a Budding Author? Where They Were Before They Were.

I currently work in television. I’m a marketing director for a small television service based out of Southwest Florida. When I first moved here and joined this company I confided to one of our administrative assistance that I wanted to begin writing to see if I could become a published author. Surprisingly she gave me the name and number of her publisher who helped her publish a series of children’s book. Not long ago one of our satellite sites further north celebrated the authorship of a series of children’s books by one of our call center representatives. And my copywriter? Well I’m almost positive he’s got a secret writing project on the side that is making him need more than one cup of coffee in the morning.

It made me think… What was Anne Rice, Stephen King, or even Harper Lee doing before they became the popular, celebrated authors that we know today? So I did some digging and this is what I found.

Harper Lee, famous for her only published work To Kill a Mockingbird, was an airline ticket agent for Eastern Airlines in the 1940’s in New York City. According to USA Today she met a wealthy couple who would eventually finance her living for a year so she could find time to pen her famous classic.

Anne Rice didn’t graduate from San Francisco State College a decorated author. Instead she plugged her time as an Insurance Claim Examiner along with other jobs until Interview with a Vampire put her on the map and on our bookshelves.

J.D. Salinger worked as the entertainment director of a luxury cruise liner called the H.M.S Kungsholm before he penned The Catcher in the Rye.

John Grisham was a teenager when he began earning one dollar per hour watering bushes in a local nursery. He later got a promotion that came with a 50 cent raise to build fences. [1] By the age of 16 he was working another laborious job assisting a plumbing contractor. Grisham has conceited that none of his manual jobs have inspired any of his novels.

After Stephen King graduated from the University of Maine, he had a hard time landing a teaching job. Eventually he would take a job as a high school janitor. King has stated in the past that Carrie was inspired by cleaning the girls’ locker room. [2]

And finally, not be outdone, Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, held down two jobs while studying at Stanford University. By day he was a lab rat for the CIA who was trying to test the validity of using LSD as a “truth serum.” At night, he would chat up mental health patients in the hospital where he worked as a janitor.

Think your job is less than inspiring your work in progress? Take heart in knowing that these now-famous authors have not always been drinking from a golden chalice.

Do you know of any other famous authors who had a surprising job?