A month ago I posted on an interesting July 31, 1964, LIFE magazine article about authors "striking it rich on their typewriters". The post didn't get much response and I suspected the scans, the best I could do at the time, made it almost impossible to read. So I bought the original magazine, which arrived from the US yesterday, in an effort to make the article more readable:
"Mothers, teach your sons the secret of a happy life. He may never win a Nobel Prize, but he may make a million dollars writing about the gloomy types who do win it."
ReplyDeleteWhat a fun article. Thank you for going to the length of buying it for us.
It's interesting to see "nobody reads fiction these days" asserted so long ago. It probably was true compared with 50 years earlier, but it is even more true today. How many people spend their evenings these days with a book rather than on the computer?
The days are gone when a writer like Anthony Burgess could make a living writing a novel a year. And what has replaced it? Kindle short stories? Possibly, but I don't know the answer.
Looks like Irving Wallace was quite a visionary in 1964. He predicted a real election decades on.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting post. I have read the works of several of the authors noted.
Thank you Travelling Type and Bill for your comments.
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