Prior to striking literary gold with her beloved work, the first female winner of the Pulitzer Prize wrote her first novel on brown parcel paper scraps. Edith Wharton’s career began with The Age of Innocence, but a new biography by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge records the novelist’s earliest writings.
The New York Times reported: “She clearly wasn’t a normal girl, and her mother, Lucretia, was alarmed by her odd, unfeminine preoccupations. Lucretia didn’t want to encourage her precocious daughter by giving her paper to write on, so Wharton would take the plain brown paper off parcels that came to the house, spread the giant sheets out on the floor and write on them in long columns. She wrote her first novel this way, at 11.”
Oddly enough, a rumor once circulated (later proved untrue) that J.K. Rowling wrote parts of the Harry Potter series on napkins in cafes. GalleyCat asks this of its readers: How did you write as a child? This humble correspondent spent childhood in the pre-iPad Age and as such had to make do with yellow pencils and Mead notebooks.