10 Facts All Book Snobs Know About These Famous Authors

Kerouac never learned how to drive. He moved to New York as a teenager and didn't need a car. During all of his adventures, he was never the one driving. That was usually his friend Neal Cassady.

Infinite Jest started as three seemingly disjointed stories. One was about a tennis prodigy and his family, the other was about a video that became a serious obsession and the last was about a man Wallace met in rehab.

Nabokov worked until he was 60 years old. He worked as a tutor, tennis coach and was a professor at Cornell University. He dedicated his time to writing full-time in 1958 after he had commercial success for Lolita.

Toni Morrison was a professor at Howard University before she began her career as a writer. She joined a writing club for fun and the story she began writing there became her debut novel, "The Bluest Eye". She was 39 when it was published.

It took Zadie Smith 2 years to write the first 20 pages of "On Beauty". She finished the rest of the book in 5 months.

James Joyce left Ireland at age 22 and never came back. He moved to Italy and then wrote his famed work, "Ulysses" which takes place in Dublin.

Virginia Woolf's writing space was a mess. It was described as an “incredible muddle of objects” by writer Vita Sackville-West.

F. Scott Fitzgerald made $55,000 in today's dollars for each story he published. That was about $4,000 in the 1920s.

The plot for "1984" was taken from a novel called "We." He reviewed the book for the Tribune. It was about a city made of glass that the government watched over. The two main characters fall in love and decide to rebel. 1984 was published 3 years later.

Kafka never finished a novel in its entirety. Three of his books, The Castle, The Trial and Amerika were put together after his death. He asked his friend, Max Brod to destroy them.