Here’s a list of 20 famous writers who either did not attend or never finished college:
- Hans Christian Andersen
- Maya Angelou
- Ray Bradbury
- Joseph Conrad
- Charles Dickens
- William Faulkner
- Ernest Hemingway
- Jack Kerouac (pictured)
- Rudyard Kipling
- Doris Lessing
- Jack London
- Herman Melville
- George Orwell
- Carl Sandburg
- William Shakespeare
- George Bernard Shaw
- Dylan Thomas
- Mark Twain
- H. G. Wells
- Virginia Woolf
That’s an impressive bunch by anyone’s standards, and I didn’t even include those who only wrote poetry (Robert Frost would have been included here, for instance).