The Reluctantly Famous: 5 Authors Who Stayed Out of the Public Eye

Considered to be one of the best living novelists, Pynchon is also one of the most reclusive. Very little is known about his personal life, and he has steered far away from any kind of publicity around his novels. When he won the National Book Award in 1974, he even had a comedian accept the prize instead. There are almost no photos of the author, particularly in his later life. His seclusion is so famous, in fact, that he helped poked fun at it in a cameo on The Simpsons. His character appeared twice, both times with a paper bag over his head (though the voice is actually Pynchon’s). His aversion to fame has done nothing to alienate his fans, who have spent years trying to discover more about the talented author. His most recent novel, Bleeding Edge, came out in 2013.

Since she published her first book in 1992, the mysterious Italian author of the beloved Neapolitan Novels has made it clear that she won’t be doing any press or interacting with fans. For over 20 years, Ferrante managed to keep her true identity a secret. The mystery was broken last year, when The New York Review of Books ran a story written by journalist Claudio Gatti who claimed that Ferrante was really a translator named Anita Raja. 

Many fans were not happy at the investigative lengths Gatti went to in order to discover the truth. Since then, Raja has confirmed that she is Ferrante but asked to be left alone, saying in a Tweet: “I will never talk about Elena Ferrante, nor will I answer in her name, nor will I say anything about her books.” The mystery around her identity may be dead, but Ferrante’s desire to stay out of the limelight is clearly still alive and well.

Even though she wrote one of the most popular books of the 20th century, Lee had no interest in the fame that came with it. She even won a Pulitzer for To Kill a Mockingbird, but she never did any interviews and rarely appeared in public to promote the book. At the Alabama Academy of Honor in 2007, she famously said: “Well, it’s better to be silent than to be a fool.” Lee also never published another book until 2015, when a sequel to Mockingbird was released, titled Go Set a Watchman. Some believe that the elderly Lee was manipulated into publishing the book and that she may not have been in well enough health to consent to the publication. She died just one year later in February, 2016, at the age of 89.

When he was younger, Proust spent years as a part of French society. But all that changed after his parents passed away in 1903 and 1905. Always sickly, Proust slowly began to withdraw, spending more and more time shut away. For 17 years he rarely left his apartment in Paris, often working through the night and sleeping during the day. He even soundproofed his room, lining the walls with corks and blocking the windows. He truly lost himself in his most famous work, the 3,200-page epic 7-part novel, In Search of Lost Time. It’s believed that he didn’t leave the apartment at all for the final 3 years of his life, eventually dying of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922.

Now considered to be one of the most famous poets in history, Dickinson saw little of that fame while she was alive. Not only was her poetry mostly underappreciated until years after her death, but she also preferred to write and live in solitude. When she was younger, Dickinson was more social, traveling and spending time with friends. But that changed in her later life, when she stopped leaving her family home after her mother’s health began to seriously decline. For 20 years Dickinson never left the house at all, even choosing to listen to her father’s funeral through her cracked bedroom door. She certainly produced a lot of work though – by the time of her death in 1886, she had written close to 1,800 poems.