Famous Expatriate Writers

For various reasons, many writers find themselves living abroad for long stretches of time. The reasons range from political turmoil at home to the need to break away from the oppressiveness of one's home culture or simply the desire to put a distance between oneself and one's past.

Sometimes these reasons are purely economic: for all our veneration of the "lost generation" living–and writing–in Paris in the 1920s, we shouldn't forget that the main force enabling this trend was quite prosaic: due to the collapse in the exchange rate of the French franc following the First World War, it was at the time entirely possible to live on very little money – provided that this little money was denominated in American dollars. How little? A figure of just $1 per day (about $20 in today's dollars) has often been quoted as sufficient for living "very comfortably" in Paris. This covered rent (an apartment or a hotel room), three daily meals taken at cafés or restaurants, frequent visits to the theater or the movies, and even alcohol. Many were getting by on less.

1. Samuel Beckett 13/Apr/1906 – 22/Dec/1989
2. Sergei Dovlatov 03/Sep/1941 – 24/Aug/1990
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald 24/Sep/1896 – 21/Dec/1940
4. Ernest Hemingway 21/Jul/1899 – 02/Jul/1961
5. Aldous Huxley 26/Jul/1894 – 22/Nov/1963
6. Henry James 15/Apr/1843 – 28/Feb/1916
7. Henry Miller 26/Dec/1891 – 07/Jun/1980
8. Vladimir Nabokov 22/Apr/1899 – 02/Jul/1977
9. Ezra Pound 30/Oct/1885 – 01/Nov/1972
10. Muriel Spark 01/Feb/1918 – 13/Apr/2006
11. Gertrude Stein 03/Feb/1874 – 27/Jul/1946

Page ID: expatriate_writers
Link to self: Famous Expatriate Writers