American writer Ring Lardner was noted for his ability to reproduce the speech patterns of baseball players and coaches. Some critics called his work satire, but he said, "[I don't know] where they get that stuff about me being a satirist... I just listen."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (born in Colombia) was a struggling writer who was so broke that he had to sell his wife's hair dryer to pay for postage when he sent his novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" to a publisher. It is now seen as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, and he later won a Nobel Prize for Literature.