How do you come to terms with the fact that most writers come from a wealth background?

I am comfortably off so it doesn't concern me.

James Joyce was born lower middle-class as a colonized subject who wasn't allowed entry into Ireland's best college because he was Catholic.

He was never rich. He worked as an English teacher in a rural Italian elementary school for a decade after publishing the greatest novel in the English language.

It makes sense that a lot of writers had the financial means to write without having to work forty hours a week, but it isn't a rule that great artists come from obscene wealth.

Nope I admit Celine was poor. Dostoevsky was born among the elites and remained one throughout his youth despite gambling his money away. His first book Poor Folk was only published because another boarding school friend worked at the publishing house and allowed him to revise it for publication.

>Hemingway
Was born to a wealth family in the US, chose to live in relative poverty while living the bohemian lifestyle in Paris with wealthy writers

>Camus
Fair enough.

>Kafka
Wealthy enough to be able to work 5 hours a day

>obscene
Not the argument in question

Jesus Christ.

Did you black out during the first 9/10 of that post and only come to in time to say "not an argument" after reading the last two words?

James Joyce is an example of a working class writer who managed to churn out masterpieces despite never having a cushy inheritance to fall back on like Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, etc.

>inb4 the word "cushy" disqualifies my whole post

>Hemingway
>Was born to a wealth family in the US, chose to live in relative poverty while living the bohemian lifestyle in Paris with wealthy writers
That's my point though. His wealthy background was not a major factor in his being a writer and he in fact rejected that very background. He chose to work as a journalist before he wrote seriously and when he wrote seriously, until he started making real money off of his writing he was poor as fuck. His families financial background had fuck all to do with his career.

>Kafka
>Wealthy enough to be able to work 5 hours a day
So being middle class is wealthy now. You have redefined being wealthy to no Ethiopia tier poorness.

>Dickens
Spent most of his life poor as all hell.

>Orwell
Made so little money he reviewed anything that was shoved under his nose and wrote war propaganda. He didn't make any real money until he was 40.

>Poe
Famous for being poor.

>Blake
Struggled to make small money his whole life.

>Keats
Was born into a family that couldn't afford to pay for where they lived. Lower middle class.

Joyce was from a disgraced higher middle-class, his family went to ruin after Parnell fell or something like that, but as far as I remember, he and his younger brother (StanislausI think?) had a pretty good education early on, which allowed Joyce to frequent the jesuis school on Portrait based on good will of the fathers alone with his family devotion and his intelligence.

Again it sounds like you are extending far beyond what a normal person would call wealthy. If someone said to me I'm so wealthy that I couldn't afford to send my kids to a nice school it had to be done as a special favor I would respond that you aren't wealthy.

>I'm going to assume he had a wide array of friends and acquaintances who offered him the opportunity to have life experiences.

Pure ideology

What's there to come to terms with?

His father had a brief change of fortunes that brought him into the middle-class when Joyce was a boy (again, not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination) but lost his job while Joyce was still in elementary school and forced the whole family into poverty. Two of his siblings died of typhoid for Christ's sake. Not exactly lifestyles of the rich and famous here.

But Joyce worked his whole life. He was never rich and absolutely does not fit your definition of the NEET writer a la Steinbeck.

The same could be said of a great many other writers. Consider any black novelist in the United States at the turn of the century, for instance.

Proust was a NEET too
Stendhal never sold more than a thousand copy of his books while he was alive, and never had problems
but Rousseau lived all his life in poverty

This, until recently, spare time and education, along with existencial crisis, was a priviledge of the upper class.

Pynchon is a Catholic m8

D. H. Lawrence was the son of a coal miner

Well, I respond with logic. Most people that come from a poverty-stricken background do not have the time to study literature or have the grace period to 'discover themselves', gain traction in the literary world, or go through the rigamarole of publisher rejections before getting lucky. The fact that a lot of them come from a position of middling family income or even one of affluence doesn't bother me, as it doesn't devalue their ability to be contemplative or prevent them from being immersed in the human experience. The notion that the artist need be the voice of his brethren, from his brethren, is immature

he's also half jewish i believe

nah, his father was a WASP, his mother was a Catholic (Thomas was raised in his mother's religion mostly)

How do you know this stuff?

vulture.com/2013/08/thomas-pynchon-bleeding-edge.html