8 Famous Authors Who Were Never Full-Time Writers

William Carlos Williams
Perhaps best remembered for two of his shortest, most evocative poems, Williams was also a doctor, and a great success at both his callings. He was chief of pediatrics at a New Jersey hospital for almost 40 years, as well as a leading modernist poet.

John Kennedy Toole
Toole held a variety of teaching posts throughout his life, first at the University of Louisiana, then at Hunter College, and finally at a Dominican College. It was while teaching at Dominican College that Toole completed and submitted A Confederacy of Dunces for publication—but it wasn’t published until after his suicide at the age of 31, following a campaign by his mother to bring the manuscript to the attention of National Book Award–winning author Walker Percy.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The man behind the Sherlock Holmes stories was a practicing physician throughout his writing career. In fact, his first Sherlock story was penned while waiting for patients at his medical practice. Between the first Sherlock story and the subsequent five, Doyle found time to study ophthalmology in Vienna and set up a new practice as an ophthalmologist.

Franz Kafka
An insurance clerk by day and an avid writer by night, Kafka claimed to hate his day job processing personal injury claims for industrial workers. He never did quit that job, though, and stayed at the position for 10 years before being placed on a pension due to illness.

T.S. Eliot
The Nobel Prize–winning poet who penned The Wasteland held a number of full-time day jobs. In addition to his literary pursuits, Eliot was a schoolteacher, a banker, and an editor at a publishing house.

Wallace Stevens
Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry while practicing very successfully as an insurance lawyer. In fact, Stevens famously turned down a faculty position at Harvard because he didn’t want to give up his post as vice-president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company.

Lewis Carroll
“Lewis Carroll” was the pen name of one Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a writer, mathematician, teacher, and photographer. Even after he rose to fame for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dodgson continued to lecture on mathematics at Oxford. His love of both logic and seeming nonsense shone through in his timeless fantasy works.

Bram Stoker
The author of Dracula created history’s most notorious vampire while employed as the manager of the Lyceum Theater in London and assistant to actor Sir Henry Irving. Stoker maintained that job for 27 years, until Irving’s death, after which Stoker managed the Prince of Wales Theater.