Georges Simenon

Simenon left school at fifteen to support his family after his father's illness, worked as a cub reporter in Liège, then moved to Paris at nineteen and spent his twenties churning out pulp novels under some two dozen pseudonyms, reportedly producing dozens of books a year before he ever published under his own name. Inspector Maigret, introduced in Pietr the Latvian, gave him a signature creation and financial security at last.

He kept writing at the same industrial pace for decades (nearly two hundred serious 'romans durs' alongside some seventy-five Maigret novels, often drafted in a matter of days) while living restlessly across France, the United States, and Switzerland. Famously prolific in his private life as well, by his own later claim, he died in Lausanne in 1989 as one of the best-selling novelists of the twentieth century.