László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel prize today, was a night watchman for a herd of cows while writing his first novel. I liked Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance; reading them it was pretty obvious that he would win a Nobel, not more than 10-20 people alive today write at that level.
Henrik Karlssonsubstack.comHenrik Karlsson (@henrikkarlsson)
Joseph Heller wrote Catch 22 in the evenings after work - it took him eight years spending 2-3 hours each night.
source: Daily Rituals, Mason Currey
The finished piece would stretch to more than thirty thousand words and be divided into two parts, to appear in two consecutive issues of the magazine. It’s a marvel of long-form reporting and one of the more beloved entries in McPhee’s long bibliography. It couldn’t have existed, however, without McPhee’s willingness to put everything else on
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They lived by schoolteaching or freelancing. Their friends did likewise: they were playwrights, publishers, reporters, editors or essayists, but only a handful were university insiders. When Sartre was offered the Légion d’honneur for his Resistance activities in 1945, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, he rejected them both, citing a
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he was who I wanted to be when I grew up. He’s one of the great nonfiction writers of our time, a genius of reportage and the profile, someone who could take any curious whim and turn it into a compelling book.