When Does a Writer Become a Writer?

Before they became celebrated authors, most literary figures had day jobs. When did they start thinking of themselves as "writers"?

From a piece in the Atlantic...

Franz Kafka was a legal secretary at the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague (later: In the Czech Lands), where he wrote reports like "Accident Prevention in Quarries," and rose to a top office position, Obersekretär. Though his bureaucratic labors bore literary fruit—providing context and imagery for his fiction writing—Kafka came to feel bogged down by the daily grind. "Writing and office cannot be reconciled, since writing has its center of gravity in depth, whereas the office is on the surface of life," he wrote to his fiancée in 1913. "So it goes up and down, and one is bound to be torn asunder in the process."

T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, was inclined to keep his day job even after it was financially necessary. When the Bloomsbury group offered to set up a fund that would allow him sufficient funding to become a full-time writer, the poet turned them down. "This idea that Eliot should be freed from the drudgery of work misses the point that he was actually very interested in the minutiae of everyday life—he was a commentator on the quotidian," British Library curator Rachel Foss told The Guardian.

And then there were the young writers with unrealized ambition and bills to pay. Anton Chekov was a physician. Laura Ingalls Wilder taught a class of five students in a one-room schoolhouse, and later became secretary-treasurer of the Mansfield Farm Loan Association in Missouri. John Steinbeck spent the summer of 1928 giving tours of a fish hatchery in Lake Tahoe, where he met his future wife. After losing that job in the fall, Steinbeck followed her to San Francisco, where he became a warehouseman at the Bemis Bag Company factory. Margarite Duras wrote technical reports as an assistant in the French Colonial Office, and then worked on publicity for French bananas and tea. Anne Sexton was a fashion model. At an evening writing seminar taught by Robert Lowell, she met Sylvia Plath, who was working by day as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital. Harper Lee shelved books and rang up sales in a shop, and then got a gig as an airline ticket clerk—first for Eastern Airlines, then for the British Overseas Air Corporation. Unable to afford a real desk, she wrote on a door that she lay across two sawhorses.