Great works of literature created from humble resources

December 28, 2007 10:20 AM

Any examples of great works of literature that were written on scraps of paper or created using inferior devices?
posted by survivorman to Writing & Language (32 answers total)

What are "inferior devices"? Parchment? Feather quills? Or do mean something like scratching a novel onto a prison wall with a toothpick?
posted by grumblebee at 10:26 AM on December 28, 2007

Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" was originally typed onto one very very long scroll. Supposedly from start to finish in just a couple of days.
posted by autojack at 10:27 AM on December 28, 2007

Wasn't it Lolita that was written entirely on index cards?
posted by djgh at 10:32 AM on December 28, 2007

djgh, Nabokov wrote all his books on index cards and then pieced them together as he went.

Then there's his book Pale Fire, which is a book written on index cards about a piece of poetry written on index cards :P.
posted by milarepa at 10:39 AM on December 28, 2007

William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch was pretty much written that way—Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg edited it together from thousands of notes that Burroughs had put together.

One of my professors would go on about how every ten years or so there would be a "restored" edition of Naked Lunch put out. "Restored to what, exactly?"

As for On the Road: while he did write the entire thing on on roll, you have to realize that he had been writing and tinkering with the scenarios that ended up in the book for a while beforehand. So it isn't like it came from Ginsberg head fully-formed.

And what is it with these Beat writers that causes them to spurn 8x5 paper?
posted by Weebot at 10:47 AM on December 28, 2007

Response by poster: What are "inferior devices"? Parchment? Feather quills? Or do mean something like scratching a novel onto a prison wall with a toothpick?

Yes, yes and absolutely.
posted by survivorman at 10:48 AM on December 28, 2007

How about The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?

The entire book was written by Bauby blinking his left eyelid.

posted by MrMoonPie at 10:53 AM on December 28, 2007

This may be a bit too meta, but in the universe of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, the book itself was written and illustrated by a secretive blind man on whatever he had around at the time: looseleaf paper, index cards, napkins, the backs of photos, the interiors of other books, and other miscellaneous scraps.
posted by Rhaomi at 11:03 AM on December 28, 2007

The Canterbury Tales was written by hand on parchment. Of course, that was pretty much as advanced as technology got, then. Maybe it would be better if you specified what the earliest date you're interested in is.
posted by cerebus19 at 11:04 AM on December 28, 2007

Response by poster: The answers I've gotten so far are amazing.

cerebus19: Any real-life examples of literary works written on "looseleaf paper, index cards, napkins, the backs of photos, the interiors of other books, and other miscellaneous scraps" as Rhaomi put it would be awesome.

Again, some good answers thus far.
posted by survivorman at 11:13 AM on December 28, 2007

Franz Rosenzweig wrote his masterpiece, The Star of Redemption while stationed in the trenches during WWI. He composed elements of the book on postcards which he mailed home to his mother.
posted by felix betachat at 11:13 AM on December 28, 2007

Ronald Firbank wrote a lot on index-type cards, I believe.
posted by londongeezer at 11:13 AM on December 28, 2007

Speer's "Inside the Third Reich" was written on scraps of toilet paper and food wrappers while he was in Spandau for 20 years.

Probably not a "great work of literature" but not necessarily a bad one.
posted by klanawa at 11:14 AM on December 28, 2007

De Sade wrote 120 Days of Sodom on a long scroll he hid in his cell in the Bastille. "Great" is a bit of a stretch, though.
posted by goo at 11:19 AM on December 28, 2007

Not sure if you consider them GREAT WORKS OF LITERATURE, but Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle novels were written in longhand with a fountain pen. Here's another mention from Neal himself:

I’ve written every word of it so far with fountain pen on paper. Part of the theory was that it would make me less long-winded, but it hasn’t actually worked.

posted by steveminutillo at 11:28 AM on December 28, 2007 [1 favorite]

So it isn't like it came from Ginsberg head fully-formed.

Umm...it isn't like it came from Ginsberg's head at all. Kerouac wrote On the Road.
posted by limeonaire at 11:32 AM on December 28, 2007

Ooh, also anything written recently by Stephen Hawking.
posted by steveminutillo at 11:34 AM on December 28, 2007

limeonaire: Well, I felt my IQ drop by about 30 points.

That sentence was technically correct, at least. That's gotta count for something, right?
posted by Weebot at 11:39 AM on December 28, 2007

Did Solzhenitsyn compose something in the gulag using a rosary made out of dried bread to memorize his composition? I have a very clear memory of a junior high English teacher telling this story, but google doesn't seem to think it happened. I mention this because you ok'ed "scratched on a prison wall with a toothpick," though I'm not sure if you're more interested in the method or the physical scraps of paper, etc.
posted by Meg_Murry at 11:49 AM on December 28, 2007

Pascal's Pensées were written on scraps of paper.
posted by kidbritish at 12:28 PM on December 28, 2007

James Joyce wrote parts of Finnegans Wake with charcoal on large sheets of paper (I seem to recall it being described as butcher paper in one of the biographies, but don't know if that's in fact what it was). His eyesight was failing and at times he had temporary bouts of total blindness, and so it was the only way he could write.

As he reported to Harriet Weaver (his patron) in 1923: "In spite of my eye attack I got on with another passage by using a charcoil pencil (fusain) which broke every three minutes and a large sheet of paper. I have now covered various large sheets in a handwriting resembling that of the late Napoleon Bonaparte when irritated by reverses."
posted by scody at 12:39 PM on December 28, 2007

W.F. Hermans, one of great Dutch writers, who is slowly gaining some attention for his books years after his death, did.

Hermans used to be a geology professor/lecturer [the titles are a bit different over here] at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. But his literary fame/notority got in the way; another staff member of his faculty got jealous and acted on that. Hermans resigned eventually from his tenure, according to him because he was falsely accused of not doing his job properly.

He then moved to Paris, and wrote the novel"Onder professoren [Among professors] there; a satirical roman à clef about Groningen university life. Legend has it he typed the whole book on the blank backsides of university handouts and letters. Which let to a policy change there: from that moment on the Rijksuniversiteit made sure they printed all their letters and official announcements using both sides of the paper.
posted by ijsbrand at 12:50 PM on December 28, 2007

While imprisoned, Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o (formerly Jmes Ngugi) wrote his novel Devil on the Cross on prison-issued toilet paper. (Haven't read it, so I don't know whether it qualifies as great literature. But his most recent novel, Wizard of the Crow, certainly does.)

Also, Emily Dickinson's poems, some of which were written on the backs of envelopes and such.
posted by azure_swing at 1:07 PM on December 28, 2007

I don't really consider it an inferior device, but it's a good story:

Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 on a rental typewriter in the basement of UCLA's Lawrence Clark Powell Library. Since rental fee for the typewriter was 10 cents an hour, it cost him around $9.20 to produce.
posted by sharkfu at 1:15 PM on December 28, 2007 [2 favorites]

Wallace Stevens wrote the first drafts of his poems (at least post-Harmonium) on scraps of paper he carried around in his pockets while walking to work. However, it can hardly be described as humble because since he was vice president of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company (now known as The Hartford, one of the largest insurance companies in the US) he had his secretary type them up.
posted by Kattullus at 1:50 PM on December 28, 2007

Response by poster: Schweet! Some great answers here. Thanks for everyone's input!
posted by survivorman at 2:33 PM on December 28, 2007

Jane Austin wrote on scraps of paper so she could hide them under her blotter or cushion so people would not know she was a writer.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:40 PM on December 28, 2007

Best answer: When Martin Luther King Jr. was demonstrating in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, local clergymen wrote a letter to the editor denouncing "outsiders." King was arrested the day the letter was published and he wrote Letter from Birmingham Jail in response, beginning his letter in the margins of the newspaper the clergymen's letter appeared in and continuing on scraps of paper supplied by an orderly, and finishing it on a notepad provided by his attorneys. King's letter became a landmark document of the Civil Rights Movement. (Nice writeup in Salon.)
posted by kirkaracha at 5:15 PM on December 28, 2007

Brendan Behan's first play "The Landlady" was written in longhand on whatever paper he could scrounge while in Mountjoy prison, potentially to be performed by the inmates, but one story is that rehearsals provoked a riot among the prisoners...
posted by pupdog at 5:52 PM on December 28, 2007

William Carlos Williams was a doctor and a poet. He often wrote his poems on prescription pads.

Williams operated a medical practice in his Rutherford home from 1910 to 1952 and delivered some 2,000 infants, while maintaining a second-floor studio for his writing. From lines scribbled on prescription pads and typed while he rested between patients, he submitted polished human-centered verse to magazines and journals.
posted by marsha56 at 7:34 PM on December 28, 2007

If I'm not mistaken, Konrad Lorenz wrote Behind The Mirror while a POW in Russia. He wrote it on the backs of potato cloths.
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:47 PM on December 28, 2007

Another one for the surprisingly long written-on-prison-toilet-paper list: some passages of Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos were, indeed, written on prison toilet paper, the "prison" in this case being an open-air cage in the American army's Disciplinary Training Center at Pisa. Pound was being held there for broadcasting Fascist propaganda during WWII.

The next two sections of Pound's Cantos (Section: Rock-Drill and Thrones) were written in an insane asylum, apparently within earshot of an obnoxiously loud TV set--making these volumes, in the words of Richard Sieburth, "probably the only two major American poems ever written with (and against) a television running continually in the background." Maybe not "inferior devices," per se, but definitely unpropitious circumstances! (See also: As I Lay Dying, written while Faulkner was on the job as a night watchman in the U of Mississippi power plant, with the dynamo humming away in the background.)
posted by DaDaDaDave at 5:54 PM on January 3, 2008