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Sex workers,politicians,people with weird careers,daredevils,travelers.etc etc...things along those lines...I have found a few but always looking for more!
I presume you are talking about generic writing of literary merit, and not simply people who (ghost-)wrote about their work or their careers or their field of expertise.
James Church, a nom de plume for an unknown ranking foreign service officer, wrote a series of who-dun-its taking place in North Korea, such as the excellent "A Corpse in the Koryo".
A practicing doctor, Abraham Verghese, wrote "Cutting for Stone", one of the best novels of the decade.
"The Reader", another must-read classic, was written in his spare time by a court judge, Bernhard Schlink.
E. L. James was a television executive, whose dabbling in writing turned out to be "Fifty Shades of Gray".
Obviously, there were a lot of them who had to have a day-job until they published something. Like, Mark Twain was a deckhand on a river boat, and a lot of them, from Vonnegut to Hemingway to Stephen Crane were soldiers, but already possessed of a skill and desire to write.
I can't say his work is biography. It's what's called gonzo journalism but Hunter S. Thompson has a few off the wall types of books (from what I understand). Personally, I'd like to get some of his work some day.
One of my all-time favorite books is Mr. Nice by Howard Marks, about his adventures as an international drug smuggler. I also liked The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost, about his adventures living with his wife in the South Pacific island nation of Kiribati.
Sex workers,politicians,people with weird careers,daredevils,travelers.etc etc...things along those lines...I have found a few but always looking for more!
The only ones I can think of are Highliners by William McClosky (commercial fishing); a mystery by Glen Yngve - which I haven't been able to find - who was a Harvard grad and a commercial fisherman in Alaska for many, many years; a variety of titles by Leslie Leyland Fields - she and her husband raised quite a few children while working part of the year commercial fishing, and a couple of her books tell the stories of other men and women who work as commercial fishermen in the North Pacific. One of her first and my favorite is The Entangling Net. I'd like to read several others of her books, but a] they are too expensive in paper, and b] they aren't available in ebook format.
McClosky's book is supposedly fiction, but it's also interspersed with vignettes of people he knew (and I knew) in the fishing industry. I don't know anything about Yngve's book, except that it was supposed to be the first in a trilogy and friend sent me a copy of the newspaper when it was released - he was a neighbor of mine for many years. Leslie Fields was also a friend and instructor of mine. It's amazing to me how many writers can succeed while living in rural Alaska. These are semi-fictional and sort of autobiographical. And there's always Tom Bodett, he lived in an even smaller rural town in Alaska and everyone knows now about how Motel 6 will keep the light on for ya.
None of these include the wide variety of technical reports and other non-fiction that came from the same small town.
Sex workers,politicians,people with weird careers,daredevils,travelers.etc etc...things along those lines...I have found a few but always looking for more!
My taste runs more towards inner journeys than external ones, so the first author may appeal more to you than the others I list...
"Pecked to Death by Ducks" by Tim Cahill (he has several collections of travel stories, incl. "Road Fever")
"I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse ? : an illustrated memoir" by Suzy Becker
"Finding a Different Kind of Normal: Misadventures with Asperger Syndrome" by Jeanette Purkis
"Well Enough Alone: A Cultural History of my Hypochondria" by Jennifer Traig
Couple more authors who tried doing things differently & wrote about those experiments:
George Plimpton (various volumes), A.J. Jacobs ("The Guinea Pig Diaries" is the one I read, but there are more).
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