Writers: The Rich and the Poor

[Anstasia]

Hi all,

Your posts are awesome to my questions about writers and their love lives, and I started reading randomly about the authors which you pointed me to. I came across Pessoa's lowly financial status. So now I am interested to know which writers fared well financially and which ones weren't so lucky, even if they may or may not have experienced it as a problem. And it could be that for some their financial fortunes changed for the better or the worse.

Thank you for your posts in advance!

[wallflower5]

Many writers were poor. Look at Baudelaire and Rimbaud. However, Honore de Balzac fared well because he constantly wrote new books. He had manic disorder that caused him to overwork. Alan Paton, author of "Cry, the Beloved Country," fared well finacially because that book was an immediate success. Thus, with the small fortune he made from "Cry, the Beloved Country, he was able to write books as he put it in his own words that "cost more to write than their sales could ever repay."

[JCamilo]

Very few non modern best-seller writer got rich writting. Mostly because until XIX century, writing was not even a profession. This does not mean they had a poor life, some had stable jobs that allowed them a quiet life.

from the top of my head, Voltaire became rich, not only because he received money from many governants, controled his busines well, and found a failure in a lotery that allowed him to win a lot of money. Shakespeare ended with a good amount of money too.

Guys like Poe,Coleridge, Keats, Cervantes, Dostoievisky, Borges, Baudelaire had ups and dooooowns money wise. Nobility like Tolstoy, Karen Blixen, Montesquieu... well, they had lands.

Some are not rich, but worked for a noble or pattron or received some pension from a governament or university, which granted them some peace... it was like Pushkin (besides his wife spending more money than he earned), Goethe...

[Anstasia]

Do you know if any of them explored the issue of poverty or riches in their writings? I am still browsing through Pessoa on googlebooks, and I see that he has written something on millionaires (I have not read it yet).

I am interested to see how they dealt with their poverty or how the managed their financially comfortable lives. Perhaps some had hard time accepting that they become well off?

Thanks for your posts!

[Alexander III]

Many writers were poor. Look at Baudelaire and Rimbaud. However, Honore de Balzac fared well because he constantly wrote new books. He had manic disorder that caused him to overwork. Alan Paton, author of "Cry, the Beloved Country," fared well finacially because that book was an immediate success. Thus, with the small fortune he made from "Cry, the Beloved Country, he was able to write books as he put it in his own words that "cost more to write than their sales could ever repay."

I would not classify Baudelaire as poor though. He never worked a job in his entire life and he life a dandy lifestyle with his mothers money.

[OrphanPip]

Dickens is likely the obvious author to think about the effects of wealth and poverty. As a child his father was put in debtor's prison and Dickens was forced to work in factories to repay his father's debt. He then became a very successful and fairly rich author of serial novels.

Dickens novels often deal with the conditions of the working poor in London, he also included a lot of semi-autobiographical incidents into his novels (especially in David Copperfield) and was fond of "rags to riches" sort of stories.

[Seasider]

Virginia Woolf said that the two essential requisites for a woman writer were...a room of her own and and £500 a year. I think she probably assumed that the money would be in the form of a legacy,so that the woman should not have to be employed. Her family was, if not wealthy comfortably off. Clive Bell I think it was spoke of the period between 1900 and 1930 as a time when an income like that could buy a comfortable life. One big difference was that the professional upper middle class to which he and Virginia belonged rented their properties rather than bought them.

[IceM]

Jane Austen comments on the impact of wealth in courtship in her fictional novels. Dickens comments on it; Toni Morrison uses wealth as a form of stratification in Song of Solomon. In non-fiction, Thoreau addresses it heavily in Walden; in fact, the rejection of wealth is the premise of his journal and the experiment it chronicles.

[Anstasia]

Have you come across a novel where a character comes to terms with wealth; i.e. brought up in poverty, etc. but eventually coming to the realization that he/she deserves to be wealthy?

Thoreau's Walden embraces poverty, so that's kind of going in the opposite direction of what I think I need.

V. Woolf does not seem to have had any financial fluctuations in her life. Dickens sounds like a good candidate, but he's all about empathizing with the poor, which is not what I am after.

[Mohammad Ahmad]

Rich & poor
Usually who was tortured in his life tends for writing since without suffering your livelihood and complaining others like you or of low income besides paying your attention to those suffering sickness, all those factors will charge your pen and your soul for writing.
On the other hand if we make compression between variant categories of writers we shall those who passed by critical and difficult circumstances will be the majority between writers

[R.F. Schiller]

Vladimir Nabokov grew up in an incredibly wealthy Russian Aristocratic family that allowed him to have many governesses and tutors from a young age. His family then lost their wealth in the Revolution and he was quite poor for the next 20+ years in Berlin/Paris. His fortunes improved slightly as a lecturer at Cornell University later on, but he was not granted tenure so his salary was not high (he was a course instructor, not a professor). Lolita was published in America in 1958 and instantly became a best-seller; Nabokov made so much money that he could afford to go to Switzerland and live in the Montreux Palace Hotel for the rest of his life (~25 years).

[Eiseabhal]

Very few people ever made money writing poetry (Tennyson did) Many have made a good living writing prose. But often writers have started writing while another job paid the initial bills. There is no connection whatsoever between the quality of writing and the quantity of the writer's spondulaks.

[YesNo]

I think you're right about poetry. Making a living off of it may not be the best way to measure influence. Even influence may not be a measure of quality, but if there is no influence does the quality matter?

[ennison]

Yes the quality matters. But the quality of soup is different from roast beef and roast beef from pudding and only a few reading this have ever heard of guga. Likewise poetry. Profundity is not all. Influencing your peers is not all. The quality of the described personal experience matters. For quite some time those referred to scathingly as metaphysical poets had little influence then they were rediscovered. I think I have wide-ranging tastes in poetry but that is not to say I do not have preferences. And a poet can be influenced at different times by quite diverse forms of poetry including some fairly "shallow" forms. In Gaelic we refer to light-hearted comic poems as rabht. But a good rabht can take on a life of its own and contain a quality that poets intending epics fail to achieve.