Bohumil Hrabal

Hrabal worked as a railway dispatcher, an insurance agent, a traveling salesman, and finally a baler of wastepaper, the last job supplying the compactor and condemned books at the center of Too Loud a Solitude directly from his own experience. He didn't publish his first book until he was nearly fifty, delayed for years by circumstance and censorship alike.

After the 1968 invasion his work was banned outright and passed hand to hand in samizdat; when officials later allowed sanctioned editions with cuts he'd agreed to, some dissident friends felt he'd compromised, a rift that pained him. He died in 1997 after falling from a fifth-floor hospital window while feeding pigeons, a death the official inquiry ruled accidental.