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Poet, critic and editor Ezra Pound worked with some of our most hallowed writers, including T.S. Elliot, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce throughout his career, so it’s safe to say he knew quite a bit about the types of writers hanging out in lonely garrets and coffee houses.

Maria Popova of Brain Pickings found these six types of writers described in Pound’s book ABC of Reading in 1934, so for the particularly geeky bookworms out there who fantasize about living the Left Bank lifestyle of the early 1900s, feel free to speculate if he had anyone in particular in mind.

When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:

1. Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.

2. The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.

3. The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.

Full story at Brain Pickings. Additional info via Wikipedia.

Types of writers.