/lit/ - Literature

The nigger writers

>>18057825
melville was a brokeboy

>>18057825
George Orwell (initially, at least), a fair few Grub Street writers back in the day (John Cleland, for example.) Karl Marx. Lots of authors were dirt poor until they found success, sometimes later in life. Cormac McCarthy was supported by his wife and lived on some broken down hobby farm for most of his early adulthood. Melville died broke. Baudelaire, Gogol... It's too common to list every such writer (and doesn't even make sense, really, since people's fortunes wax and wane throughout life, including and perhaps especially artists.)

>>18057825
He was an engineer. How was he poor?

>>18058051
I thought he married a wealthy woman and lived on her family's farm?

>>18058211
As I understand it he trained to become an engineer but spent most of his life either in a prison camp, writing full-time (from the age of twenty-five, after publishing Poor Folk), or gambling his money away.

>>18057825
Henry David Thoreau

>>18057825
Velimir Khlebnikov
François Villon
Léon Bloy
Francis of Assisi

>>18057825
most writers are poor

Kafka?

>>18057825

Adi Shankaracharya (pbuh) renounced the world to become a sannyasin at the age of 8. While he was materially poor all his life, his writings are some of the most metaphysically rich works ever written.

>>18058472
Kafka wasn't poor, and consciously decided to work as few hours as possible in order to write. He also lived ten minutes away from his workplace, and paid no rent to his family with whom he lived.

>>18058520
Damn fr? That's based. What's up with Indians though, you know what I mean?

>>18058528
Oh word. I was just guessing, I thought he was like a porn loser virgin.

Musil
Pessoa
Nabokov
Kerouac
Dostoevsky
Cervantes
Nietzsche
Dante
Poopy Meets Diaper
Jeff Kinney
Sarah
Jan Kerouac
Rabelais
boccaccio
Celine
Hume
Burke
Shelley
Dabba
Penis
Up
My
Butt
Baurillard
Edmund O Russell
de Sade

>>18058234
he had financial troubles his entire life and her inheritance was literally the only thing keeping their family from going under

>>18058211
Engineer for the army.. the red army..

dude was paid in bread most likely

>>18057825
Diogenes (he wrote stuff but it was lost when the Library of Alexandria was destroyed).

> Villiers' aunt died in 1871, ending his financial support. Though Villiers had many admirers in literary circles (the most important being his close friend Stéphane Mallarmé), mainstream newspapers found his fiction too eccentric to be saleable, and few theatres would run his plays. Villiers was forced to take odd jobs to support his family: he gave boxing lessons and worked in a funeral parlour and was employed as an assistant to a mountebank. Another money-making scheme Villiers considered was reciting his poetry to a paying public in a cage full of tigers, but he never acted on the idea. According to his friend Léon Bloy, Villiers was so poor he had to write most of his novel L'Ève future lying on his belly on bare floorboards, because the bailiffs had taken all his furniture. His poverty only increased his sense of aristocratic pride.

>>18057825
Joyce.

When he described snegirevs house in Karamazov he was describing his house

>>18058091
>Cormac McCarthy was supported by his wife
His wife actually left him when he asked her to do that. He survived off of grants and guggenheim fellowships.

>>18059396
Joyce was never poor. He was middle class and his father sometimes had financial troubles like all middle class fathers.
>>18057825
Arno Schmidt

>>18058211
He was Russian.

>>18057825
Garcia Marquez.
After writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, he could not afford postage to send the manuscript to the published. He send half the manuscript, and then his wife had to pawn some household items to get the money so he could ship the other half.

>>18059498
And yet he turned staunchly against socialism. How cucked can you be lmao

>>18059832
For real. Marxist ideals did wonders for the people of Russia and Eastern Europe, Dostoy was dead wrong on that one eh

>>18059353
Aw man you beat me to it. Love Villers. Decadence forever!!

>>18058243
Oh yeah he did get sent to the gulags but that was a bit later I think.

>>18059268
>>18059756
So? Even at the time, being an officer an engineer for the army would’ve been a relatively prestigious position I think. If he was poor, it’s more likely he was poor after the fact because he was imprisoned in a labor camp.

Bolano was a lowly security guard at a beach somewhere. Shit job.

>>18057841
fpbp

>>18059353
based

>>18058091
>Marx
Marx was rich but die poor due to bad financial decisions

>>18058974
Half of these people never lived in poverty.

> tfw still broke and without a vocation but will never be a classic author

>>18057825
Karl Marx sucked at technical writing. Even with millions dead, they still can't implement his teachings.

>>18059268
>the red army
It wasn’t even created for another 30 years after his death. How can you be this illiterate?

>>18059832
because socialism isn't the answer to get rich

>>18057825
Max Stirner

>>18059800
sounds like those fake stories to make success stories more whimsical, doubt the veracity of this

>>18060051
security guard is a perfect job for a poor writer, specially night shift

>>18060989
Seriously seems like about 75% of acclaimed, well known writers have one of these big lies in their supposed life story. Where they conveniently happen to get caught up in some turmoil in their country or some other wild coincidence, and people close to them say that it didn't happen and/or there is no record of the supposed event when there could or should be

>The climate of want in which I lived left no mark on me. At that time, I lived in palaces of the imagination.

>>18061032
Same, Hitler. Same

>>18057825
Knut Hamsun spent much of his early life in bona fide poverty and as a sometime nomad taking up odd jobs, which obviously comes out in Hunger. The way he worked up all the way to the Nobel Prize in literature and one of Norway’s most famous writers next to Henrik fookin Ibsen is as good an example of the social mobility being a good artist can get you. And we’ll all pretend that Hamsun lived happily ever after that and died say in 1939

"I owe much; I have nothing; the rest I leave to the poor.”
— François Rabelais' will.

Also, supposedly, Rabelais once woke up in the night to see a thief rummaging about in his room. R. burst out laughing.
"What's so funny?" asked the thief.
"I'm laughing," said R, "because you hope to find something in the darkness that I can't find during the day!"

What a wag. (Or maybe this story was about someone else. Probably Rabelais, though.)

>>18061053
this, and he was abused by his uncle :(

>>18058974
Shelley was probably the wealthiest canonical poet who ever lived, and even Hazlitt mentions Hume's comparatively grand upkeep later in life, so I can't imagine what you're getting at here.

>>18061313
A couple more anecdotes about poorfag writers:

— When Samuel Johnson went to Oxford he was really poor (most of the people there were aristocrats). His shoes were really shabby and one night someone left a pair of new ones outside his door. SJ threw them away because he didn't want pity or charity. Well done Samuel, you're right on the borderline between based and stupid.

— Raymond Carver was really poor in his 20s & 30s. Partly because he got married and had a family early and only worked blue-collar jobs; partly because he spent a lot on alcohol. He doesn't seem to have been a nice guy. He often employed the "dine and dash" strategy at restaurants even though he knew the waitress herself would get penalized when this happened on her station. So yes, 'Fat' is a good story but that didn't mean RC was nice to waitresses IRL.

>>18058541
Kafka was handsome lol stop projecting yourself into the great writers. He had problems with his father, who was very dominant ‘alpha’ patriarch of the family, he wasn’t like that at all. Nonetheless he made money and had many lovers.

>>18059353
Based
>>18059832
bait is bad bait
>>18061053
:/

>>18059268
The red army? Are you on drugs?

>>18060991
Doesn’t exactly add to the author mystique though, does it? Not quite the same rings as “struggling journalist”, “teacher”, “artist”, or someone working a fishing vessel intermittently.

>>18058974
>Shelley
What?

>>18060006
No he went to the gulags why he was still in uni.

Dickens, at least for a while. He never finished school because he had to work on account of his family winding up in debtor's prison.

>>18059268
American education. Not even once

>>18062503
ken kesey did it to write One Flew Over, worked night shift security: among other odd jobs that's how he also got dosed by LSD by the guv'mint & took a liking to it before it was illegal

>>18059268
>Dostoevsky
>Red Army
American education everyone

>>18057825
Dosto holds the title for the all-around heavyweight hard-lifer

>Dad gets axe murdered by his own serf
>Mom dies when he is 15
> epileptic; suffers bouts of debilitating seizures
> Joins a radical student group while in college, gets arrested for it
>Faces a mock execution in which the Tsar himself, seeking to make an example of him, rides out on a thoroughbred and stares them all down after the firing squad fires blanks; is never the same
>Goes to gulag; possibly kills a man in self defense
>Joins the army after the gulag as part of mandatory service
> Becomes a writer after he gets out, suffers a life of poverty and has to beg for money at one point
>Gambling addiction; squanders what little money he has
> His first daughter, Sonya, dies 1 year old, devastating him
> Struggles with his faith in God because of all of this

Balzac earned a lot of money with his novels but was so bad at managing his money that he spent a good amount of his life in poverty escaping creditors.

>>18062549
American idiots are uneducated enough to believe the Russians actually had bread! laughing out loud

Luís de Camões

George Buchanan died so poor he couldn't leave any money for his funeral.
(he's the most important latin writer of the 16th century)

>>18062604
I thought he got arrested for some stuff he wrote when he was in his later 20s.

>>18062604
I read he started writing while working as an engineer for money too.

>>18063919
He should've wrote in the Scots dialect instead.

>>18063965
He did write in the Scots language, back then it had a total status as such with even King James VI openly publishing books supporting that, but remember his native language was Gaelic.
He didn't have much opportunity to write in Scots since he ussually operated outwith Scotland.

PKD was always on the verge of the dog food. he wrote 40+ novels though.

>>18062604
>Dostoevsky went to a gulag
It was a Katorga; the gulag system was completely different and grander in scale.