Richard Wright, before the late move to Paris, worked as a postal clerk; he later worked on the W.P.A. Federal Writers’ Project guidebook to New York, and a magazine prize helped him publish his first collection of stories, and a Guggenheim fellowship helped him have time to write “Native Son.”

Of William Faulkner, it is said that bags of undelivered mail were found, from a brief job as postmaster he performed only spottily. “As I Lay Dying” was written while he worked night shifts in a university boiler room. He eventually, for money, took a job writing for Hollywood, though he expressed ambivalence about movies, even if he liked hunting with Howard Hawks. This was years after “The Sound and the Fury.”

Anthony Trollope never stopped working for the post office.

Thomas Mann was born into a moneyed family and, aside from a brief stint in an insurance company, had no job (other than writer), Virginia Woolf was born into a moneyed family and had no job (other than writer), and Junichiro Tanizaki was born into a moneyed family that then lost their money, though he was still able to go to a fancy high school, but couldn’t pull together the tuition to make it to the end of college.

Penelope Fitzgerald had the education and milieu of a wealthy person, but not the money or time of one, and at 60 she published her first novel: a murder mystery written to entertain her dying husband. She then wrote eight more novels.

Tolstoy: rich, then gambling debt, then army, then vast wealth. Dostoyevsky: less rich, then gambling debt, then Siberia, then gambling debt again.

The lush lifestyle of Hemingway’s later years did not make it easier for him to produce good work.

Cervantes couldn’t make it as a court poet, supposedly because he was known to have Jewish ancestry, and this pushed him into decades of this and that; he lost use of a hand in the Battle of Lepanto, he was briefly captured and held as a slave, and then toward the end of his life, after many not especially remarkable works, he wrote “Don Quixote,” a book about a man with the luxury to be able to just read and read and read.

I’ve never really understood how Raymond Carver managed, though we are lucky that he did. He is less lucky; he never got to retire to Montreux.