How Writers Live

Nelson Algren, 45, wrote a successful novel five years ago called The Man with the Golden Arm, and now lives in a bungalow outside Chicago. While working on another book, Algren is living on a publisher's advance doled out to him at the rate of $100 a week. "Of the $400 a month," he explains, "my agent gets 40 bucks. I give my mother a hundred. So on $260 a month, I keep a house, a wife, a cat and a car. Don't underrate the cat.

It's my wife's, so it's got to have the best liver--about $25 worth a month." If the advance is not enough, there is the $2-limit poker session that Algren convenes twice a week in the basement of a North Michigan Avenue mansion. Algren figures that he has made $1,000 at poker this year--enough, in a pinch, to keep the novel going and the cat fat.

As U.S. writers go these days, Author Algren is fairly wellfixed. The U.S. once was accustomed to the starving writer who did some of his most important work bargaining in hock shops and died broke, e.g., O. Henry and Edgar Allan Poe. It was also accustomed to the spectacularly rich writer who made a fortune with his gold-plated typewriter, e.g., James Hilton and Zane Grey. However true or false these extreme images may have been, they describe few living U.S. authors. In his Democracy in America (1835-1840), Alexis de Tocqueville said: "In democratic times the public frequently treat authors as kings do their courtiers; they enrich and despise them ..." Few American authors are despised these days; few are very rich. They reflect the 20th century's leveling forces: economically--as well as literarily--most of them inhabit a great, grey middle stratum.

The Exceptions. A few writers--by no means the best--still manage to live in a style to which most would like to be accustomed, e.g., James Jones (From Here to Eternity) races around Marshall, Ill.

in his convertible, and Frank Yerby (The Foxes of Harrow) commutes between the Riviera and Long Island. Such fiction-factory owners as Erie Stanley Gardner live as well as factory owners.

But these are the exceptions. "Lousy," is James T. Farrell's word for the average writer's economic situation. "Scrawny and having a rank odor," growls Novelist Kenneth Roberts. "Very discouraging," says J. P. Marquand, who adds: "It's harder for a writer to amass a fortune than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven." Writes Critic Malcolm Cowley in his appraisal of The Literary Situation: "Aside from the hard-working authors of textbooks, standard juveniles, mysteries and westerns, I doubt that 200 Americans earned the major portion of their income, year after year, by writing hard-cover books." The 1950 census counted 16,184 authors in the U.S. (6,235 of them women).

Their average income is $3,000.* Twice as many new novels are published today as in the early 1900s, but of the 1,300 published through November of this year, fewer than half will make a profit, i.e., sell 5,000 copies or more in bookstores. This year's fiction bestseller, Morton Thompson's Not As a Stranger, has sold slightly more than 175,000 copies (in comparison, Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit sold 450,000 copies in 1944; Harold Bell Wright's The Eyes of the World sold an advertised 750,000 copies in two months in 1914). This year, probably no more than 25 novels sold 50,000 copies, which means that about 25 fiction writers earned (at 50^ a book) as much as $25,000 in hard-cover income for two or three years' work. With spiraling publishing costs, the author has to accept lower royalties. The 20% royalty paid to many American writers a few decades ago is now an anachronism. The current average: around 12%.

What keeps authors in business is the income from book clubs, paperback re-printers, magazines and newspapers (for serialization), Hollywood, radio, TV and Broadway. These revenues now account for more than half of most writers' incomes. But some of the biggest book clubs have lost members. Although the Book-of-the-Month Club actually claims a membership increase, its guaranteed payment to publishers--of which authors get about one-half--is now down to $40,000; it was once reported as high as $100,000.

The Part-Time Author. While there may be fewer downright poor writers today, their consciousness of poverty has increased and their tastes have grown more expensive. Nonconformists eager to struggle along in attics are not much in evidence. Most writers like to live like people, and if they must be in attics, they want them air-conditioned. Half of all American writers make New York City their headquarters, and most of those tend to settle in the outer metropolitan fringe between the gentlemen's estates and small farms. Example: having sold his first novel, The Blackboard Jungle, to the Ladies' Home Journal (for $35,000), 27-year-old Evan Hunter is moving from a Hicksville, L.I. ranch house to eastern Westchester County.

There have always been part-time writers, including some great ones (e.g., Melville, who served at sea, was a U.S. customs inspector on the New York docks).

But the part-time writer has become far more common than before. Says Novelist Merle Miller, president of the Authors' Guild: "In the igth century, the novelist turned out a book a year. He could make a living at it. Now a novelist writes a book every three years because he is doing things in between." Many writers teach, e.g., Lionel Trilling, Wallace Stegner, Katherine Anne Porter. Margaret Cousins, Karl Shapiro and John Crowe Ransom edit magazines. Some write for the movies, where it is easy to forget the novel-writing urge. By one estimate, just two Americans made a living by poetry in the early 1950s--Robert Frost and Ogden Nash. But Frost has also taught and lectured. And Nash says: "You can make a living as a poet if you are also a panelist on Masquerade Party, make guest appearances on other TV shows, and write lyrics for a successful Broadway show." Visible Ghosts. Ultimately, the economic condition of the author is shaped by the publishers. The firms are still on the lookout for the magically popular novel, but advances are smaller than ten years ago (average: $1,500). Emphasis has shifted to nonfiction that can be tailored to sell. Says one publishing executive: "We decide first of all, is there a market for this book, then second, whom could we get to do such a book and do it well." Many of these market-tested, selfhelp, how-to-do-it, picture, memoir, fad and stunt books are written by clergymen, dietitians, gardeners, gourmets, radio comedians, diplomats, psychoanalysts, and almost anyone but writers. The amateurs, of course, are provided with outlines, editors and, in many cases, ghosts (a ghost may earn from $1,000 to $5,000 a book, in addition to a whack of the royalties, and a particularly expert shade may even materialize in his own right on the title page). Many writers, submitting to the trend, have become what might be called visible ghosts--they spend increasingly more time writing fiction and non-fiction to publishers' orders and specifications.

In an age that values security, there is perhaps less security for the average creative writer than before. Says Malcolm Cowley: "I don't know whether insurance companies have tried to estimate the life expectancy of writers. Such figures, if compiled, might show that writing was one of the riskier occupations, comparable in its mortality rates with deep-sea diving, structural-steel working, and piloting experimental planes. A writer is always experimenting with new methods of soaring to heights or plunging into depths. He always has to struggle . . . and sometimes the fruits of the struggle are only exhaustion and discouragement." The struggle seems to have become harder and the writer's willingness to struggle smaller. But the American writer can find his way into print between book covers--if he has talent, perseverance and ideas. It may be that, on balance, lack of ideas is more significant than lack of cash.

Says James T. Farrell: "The question is not whether 200 writers are making a living but whether there are 200 writers in America who have something to say worth buying."

*About the same as an apprentice bank teller.

Elevator operators average $3,500, industrial workers $3,700.

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