The Day Jobs that Inspired Famous Authors

If you have work commitments that make it difficult to find the time to write, take heart: not only have some of the world’s most famous authors managed to balance writing books with a day job, but sometimes those day jobs have actually inspired their books.

That’s the message from job-search site Adzuna, who recently published an infographic looking at ‘The Day Jobs that Inspired Famous Authors’. You can see the full infographic below, but first, here are three more authors whose books just wouldn’t have been the same without their 9-5.

• Agatha Christie worked as an apothecaries’ assistant for several years, giving her a detailed knowledge of pharmaceuticals that would prove to come in handy when she turned her attention to writing detective novels.
• While Charles Dickens is known to have worked as a journalist, before that he was employed at a factory putting labels on boot polish. John Foster, a friend and biographer of Dickens, reports that he met a young boy called Bob Fagin working here.
• Moby Dick would have struggled to communicate the feeling of being at sea if it weren’t for Herman Melville’s years travelling as part of the crew on several ships.

About the author
Stephen Pritchard writes about all things to do with the world of work for Adzuna, a job search site based in the UK and operating in 11 countries (including Australia).