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Comment by svachalek | Hacker News Reader

That reminds me of another wolf, Gene Wolfe. He wrote some of the most complex and critically praised science fiction to date, and most of his famous works were done in his free time while working as an industrial engineer. Or for that matter, a certain patent clerk who wrote some really fine physics papers.

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Other examples: Baruch Spinoza, lensmaker by day, philosopher by night. Philip Glass: moving man, plumber, cab driver, and avant-garde composer. E. E. "Doc" Smith: food engineer and science fiction writer. Franz Kafka: administrator in an insurance company, and writer of history's weirdest books. Wallace Stevens: insurance company executive and poet. William Carlos Williams: doctor and poet. And these are just off the top of my head.

This is messing with my head. I love Spinoza and Kafka and couldn't imagine them as anything else but being full-time thinkers and writers.

Who told you they weren't? Are you only a programmer or a thinker about programming while at keys?

i think by full time they meant sitting around in some dingy room, smoking cigarettes and positing/thinking rather than filling most of their days with other activities that have nothing to do with this craft (and i would say to posit well, you need life experiences and they did exactly what they needed to do to become legendary)

'Another county heard from.'

Thanks for dropping by. No need to hurry back.

Thanks for that substantive contribution.

Personally, the line between 'administrator in an insurance company' and Kafka's works fits neatly within my mental model of the world.

Which makes me wonder what he called the kind of experience a person has when dealing with an insurance company: the word "Kafkaesque" didn't exist yet.

"Inspiration", perhaps.

Bukowski: pickle factory for a while then 13ish years at the united states postal service

and a lot of his work revolves around working at the post office and pickle factory

Anthony Trollope worked at the post office, Andy Weir was a programmer until he hit it big with The Martian.

Robert Frost was an insurance guy or something

Just took a look at Wikipedia. No mention of insurance, but he did write much of his early work while farming during the day. As did Robert Burns.

Was thinking of T.S. Eliot, worked at Lloyds but in banking not insurance.

No, Frost was a teacher and a farmer to make money.[1] Tom Clancy was an insurance agent.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Frost

Was thinking of T.S. Eliot

Wallace Stevens

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Stevens

Wilfred Owen: soldier and poet (whose poetry was ignored/neglected until the 1960s)

TIL Kafka worked in insurance... wild!

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