Where they actually worked
Writers are strange about desks. AUSTEN wrote at a tiny twelve-sided walnut table in the family sitting room at Chawton, on small sheets she could hide if someone came in; the door squeaked, and she asked for it not to be oiled so she would hear people approaching. Maya ANGELOU rented a plain hotel room in whatever town she was in, arrived at half past six each morning, and had the staff strip the walls of pictures so there was nothing to look at.
HEMINGWAY wrote standing up at a chest-high bookshelf. Haruki MURAKAMI gets up at four, writes for five or six hours, then runs ten kilometres, and has said the physical routine matters as much as the writing. Roald Dahl's hut and DICKENS's need for exactly the right arrangement of objects on his desk are the same instinct: the ritual is not superstition so much as a way of making a difficult thing start on time.
The day jobs and the other lives
Almost none of them started as writers. Mark TWAIN was a licensed Mississippi steamboat pilot and took his pen name from the riverboat call for two fathoms of water — safe depth. ORWELL served five years in the Imperial Police in Burma, then deliberately lived rough in Paris and London, then was shot through the throat by a sniper in the Spanish Civil War.
Agatha CHRISTIE worked in a hospital dispensary in both world wars and learned her poisons there, leaving the murders in her books pharmacologically sound. STEINBECK laboured on the ranches and farms he later wrote about. Jules VERNE trained as a lawyer and worked as a stockbroker. Emily DICKINSON did the opposite of all of it — she barely left her house in Amherst and published perhaps ten poems in her lifetime out of nearly 1,800 found in her bedroom after she died.
The names on the covers are often not their names
The three BRONTE sisters published as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, keeping their own initials, because a novel by a woman would be judged as a woman's novel. George Eliot did the same for the same reason. Lewis CARROLL was Charles Dodgson, a maths lecturer who did not want his fiction attached to his academic work.
It has not stopped. ROWLING was asked by her publisher to use initials rather than Joanne in case boys avoided a book by a woman — she had no middle name and borrowed her grandmother's, Kathleen, for the K — and later published crime novels as Robert Galbraith to find out whether they would sell on their own. They sold modestly until the pen name leaked, at which point sales rose several thousand per cent, which is an unusually clean experiment in how much a name is worth.
The rest of the shelf
Also in the grid: TOLKIEN, a professor of Anglo-Saxon who invented languages first and wrote stories to give them somewhere to live; KIPLING, who turned down a knighthood and the Poet Laureateship twice each but accepted the Nobel; Oscar WILDE, whose best play and worst year arrived within months of each other; and POE, who more or less invented the detective story and died at forty in circumstances nobody has explained.
Thomas HARDY gave up novels entirely after the reviews for Jude the Obscure and spent his last thirty years writing poetry instead. Margaret ATWOOD is still publishing. The word AUTHOR and the word NOVELIST are in there too, which between them cover everyone who ever sat down and did the unglamorous part. Our poets page picks up DICKINSON and the verse side of the shelf.