Cook's Corner:
Don’t Quit the Day Job
By Marshall J. Cook
Jack London prospected for gold. Louis L’Amour was an animal skinner. Charles Bukowski did a little bit of everything, including working in a dog biscuit factory.
And William Faulkner couldn’t hold any job for very long.
Many fiction writers hold a variety of day jobs to support themselves while they try to make it as writers. Most of them keep the day job— we’re not talking Stephen King or Danielle Steel now— long after they’ve begun to publish. And many of us never do quit that day job.
The most common day jobs for writers are what you’d expect: editor, journalist, technical writer, creative writing teacher. Some try to make a living writing book reviews and freelancing magazine articles—a profession only slightly more lucrative than fiction writing.
But in this first in a series of columns on writers and their day jobs, I’ll focus on four writers who did just about everything but teach or edit while pounding out their fiction in their off hours. These guys barely even went to school let alone teach in one.
Jack London, Louis L’Amour, William Faulkner, and the all-time hero of the working stiff writer, Charles Bukowski, were too busy working, traveling, and writing to go to school.
Jack London may have been America’s first successful working class writer. He was certainly one of our early writer/celebrities, as well known for his exploits and for his publications. The author of The Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, and many other stories, London came into this life as John Griffith Chaney, born “south of the slot” on Market Street in San Francisco. They think his father was an astrologer; it must have been written in the stars that he’d desert London’s mother, Flora, a spiritualist, before Jack was born.
Young Jack grew up in Oakland, along the waterfront, where he dropped out of school after 8th grade. He hung out at the Oakland Public Library, reading voraciously, and eventually graduated from high school. He made it through a few months of college in Berkeley before giving up on formal education.
At various times, he supported himself as a laborer and factory worker, an oyster pirate on the S.F. Bay, a sailor, and a gold prospector in the Klondike. He even hopped freights and was a hobo for several years, winding up getting arrested for vagrancy in New York State.
He ultimately settled down—sort of. He married twice, and he and his second wife sailed the Pacific to the South Seas before building a home and developing a ranch in Glen Ellen, California.
Like London, Louis L’Amour wasn’t much on formal education. He also did a lot of traveling and hoboing. He apparently knew he wanted to be a writer from before he could read, but he quit school at age 15 to learn on his own. He traveled around the west, working by turns as a ranch hand, a lumberjack, and an animal skinner (just what it sounds like). Wherever he went, he read, and he got people to tell him their stories.
In his 20’s, he hopped an East African Schooner and sailed from Africa to Asia, where he boxed professionally in Singapore.
Back in America, he started writing for the pulp magazines. Hack writing had to be easier and certainly a lot less messy than skinning animals. He wrote in many genres before settling on westerns because he had an easier time selling them.
Good choice. He hit pay dirt with the novel Hondo and never looked back. He wrote 101 books, selling nearly 200 million copies worldwide. A lifelong autodidact, he amassed a library of over 8,000 reference books, traveled to whatever locale he wanted to write about, and was a stickler for accuracy and authenticity in his work.
William Faulkner didn’t fare well in the school system or, for that matter, in the world of work. In fact, it’s hard to say just what he would have done if he hadn’t embraced the writing trade. He dropped out of high school and was rejected by the military (although he would concoct a story about having served in the Royal Canadian Air Force, one of many elaborate fictions he created about himself).
He took a couple of courses at the University of Mississippi, where he got a D in the only English class he took.
He lit out for New York City and got a job in a bookstore, but he got fired, allegedly for berating some of the customers for reading trash. He came back home to Oxford, Mississippi, where he worked for awhile in the post office. But he got fired from that job, too. One story has it that he kept the magazines until he had read them himself, while another said he read everybody’s post cards. A third tale has him cussing out a customer for expecting him to be at the beck and call of everyone who had the price of a postage stamp. By this time he had earned the nickname “Count No-Account” among the locals.
He was also writing fiction and poetry and, encouraged by the writer Sherwood Anderson, he starting writing about what he would come to call his “own little postage stamp of native soil,” which he transformed into Yoknapatawpha County, the site of most of his great fiction.
Although he had a tough time making a buck as a writer, he wrote some of the most enduring works in American literature, including in one incredible four year period five of his greatest novels, including The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and As I Lay Dying. He wrote the latter while supporting himself working nights in the power plant at the University of Mississippi, listening to the hum of the generator.
Although he never did make it in the world of academia, he won the Nobel Prize for literature and has had more than 1,300 books written about him and his work.
Not bad for a drop-out.
Charles Bukowski, perhaps the all-time King of the Day Job, attended Los Angeles City College before dropping out and moving to New York City to become a writer. Failing that, he became a drinker, but a bleeding ulcer slowed him down in that career, and he went back to writing.
To support himself, he was a dishwasher and truck driver. He delivered mail and pumped gas. He was a stock boy and a shipping clerk and, like Faulkner, worked for awhile in the post office. He was a parking lot attendant, a Red Cross orderly, an elevator operator. He worked in a slaughterhouse, a cake and cookie factory, and a dog biscuit factory.
It probably wasn’t always a lot of laughs, but it sure looks amazing on a dust jacket!
Along the way, he met all kinds of down-and-outers, and these folks populated his poems, short stories, novels, and essays. He would publish more than 45 books before dying of leukemia in his 70’s.
“The proper function of man,” Jack London once wrote, “is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time"
Our four featured writers this issue certainly exemplified that credo.
Next time, we’ll look at the advantages to the writer of enduring a wretched childhood.