[tolerance]

Cormac McCarthy appears to be an exceptional case in this respect. I skimmed through a book about it once. Early on he basically earned his keep through grants and book sales. I think he persuaded one of his old ladies to get a job while he wrote. And apparently he was always writing; pitching one book in the middle of working on another. I guess film and television soon followed.

[scandox]

Doesn't sound exceptional to me. Most of the authors I have some personal knowledge of manage through exactly that: spouses, grants, book sales, residencies and teaching creative writing.

[tolerance]

Compared to the postal workers, accountants and insurance agents named in this article they can count as exceptions too, save for the creative writing teachers.

I think Don DeLillo quit his job before his first book and never looked back.

[voidhorse]

I actually think being a full-time writer is a more feasible professions today than it probably was a few hundred years ago. On the other hand, back in the 1800s random newspapers would pay for serialized stories. That doesn't really happen anymore (save a few surviving exceptions like the New Yorker) but now we have substack and a ton of other avenues writers can use to keep afloat

[dhosek]

If you read John Fante’s Ask the Dust, he has a number of dollar amounts in there for short story sales. Those numbers are better than pretty much every contemporary opportunity without adjusting for inflation. I would say that the 20s and 30s were the ideal time. Right now, it’s pretty grim for nearly all writers. Substack and other venues tend to be kind of peanut money and there are few writers who make a living from them, especially compared to the long tail of those who make nearly nothing. And most of those who earn significant money had big reputations before Substack.

[atombender]

McCarthy was famously impoverished for most of his life. He apparently spent most of his money buying books. Late in life, the movie income from No Country for Old Men and The Road made him a multimillionaire, and his spending was apparently quite wild from then on, buying endless amounts of cowboy boots and tweed coats, as well as a large collection of vintage cars. [1]

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/two-years-cormac...

[ProllyInfamous]

His book Suttree is effectively biographical, down to his impoverished 1950s Knoxville streetslang.

I haven't read anything else, but the film No Country for Old Men is incredible storytelling (and I only started Suttree after a /hn/article from a few months ago described the polymathic dismantling of his impressive library).

His short article The Kekulé Problem sheds serious insights (to me, at least) on whether or not LLMs can, alone with language, ever become truly conscious (are words, alone, enough?). Not the main point of the article (rather: about lucid thinking/states leading to wordless solutions presenting themselves to "discoverers," dreaming).