Anthony Trollope had an unhappy start. His father was a brilliant, bad-tempered lawyer who failed at everything, and Anthony was sent to Harrow and Winchester as a poor boy among rich ones, where he was bullied and miserable. The family was rescued by his mother, Frances Trollope, who began writing in her fifties and became a bestselling author with a book about her travels in America.

At nineteen Anthony became a junior clerk in the General Post Office in London, and was by his own account a bad one. Then, in 1841, he was sent to Ireland as a postal surveyor, riding around the countryside on horseback, and everything changed. He was good at the work, he married, he took up fox hunting, and he began to write. Later, on a postal mission to the Channel Islands, he recommended trying out roadside letter boxes, and the first pillar boxes in the British Isles were set up in Jersey in 1852.

His method is famous. Every morning he rose at 5:30, was at his desk by 6, and wrote for three hours before going to his job, with his watch in front of him, aiming at 250 words every quarter of an hour. If he finished a novel before his time was up, he took out a fresh sheet of paper and began the next one. He wrote on trains, using a writing pad on his knee, and at sea, in his cabin.

The results include forty-seven novels. The Barsetshire series, beginning with The Warden (1855) and Barchester Towers (1857), follows the clergy and gentry of an imaginary cathedral town with gentle, shrewd comedy. The Palliser novels move into politics and Parliament. The Way We Live Now (1875) is a savage satire of a financial swindler and the society that worships him.

Trollope died on December 6, 1882, after a stroke. The next year his Autobiography was published, and readers were shocked by its frank account of his working hours and his earnings: it seemed unromantic that an artist should write by the clock and for money. His reputation suffered for decades. Writers have long since forgiven him, and many keep his example in mind on mornings when they would rather wait for inspiration.