Fame & Fortune: James Lee Burke Wealth of life experiences brings author big payoff
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Bankrate: Did you work as a kid?

Burke: Oh sure, everybody did. My best friend and I had a shoeshine route in the early days of World War II. We would go from door to door with a big cardboard box mounted on a wagon and people would give us their shoes and we would shine them in a garage. But we only had one color polish: brown. So everything got shined brown; if the shoes were red, we would not let that stop us. For 10 cents, we shined their shoes and gave what we called "free home delivery." We also had a blackberry business and a lawn-mowing route, so we made out quite well.

Bankrate: Did you go to college thinking you would write?

Burke: I started in prelaw, but my cousin, the writer Andre Debus, was a year ahead of me and he won first place in the Louisiana college-writing contest in 1954, so I had to enter it, too, and started writing short stories my freshman year. I published my first short story in the college literary magazine when I was just 19, and I knew then that's all I wanted to be. I've been doing it ever since.

Bankrate: No pressure from your father to be a businessman?

Burke: Well, I lost my dad when I was 18; he died as the result of an automobile accident. But my dad had wanted to be a journalist. He wrote very well, but he had a job on the pipeline, and in those days you didn't quit your job. So he worked up until his death as a pipeline man, but the job he really wanted to do was the one he never got to do. He would always tell me, "Never work at a job you don't like," and he was talking about himself of course.

Bankrate: You tried journalism yourself for a time, right?

Burke: Yeah, for a while. Real writers are guys who write what they have to, to be what they are. You write ad copy, cutlines, chase ambulances, do obits, eat lunch with the Kiwanis and Rotary guys. You do all those things as a newsman. Nobody gets to write the Pulitzer Prize story for a long time. The grunt work is the hard work.

Bankrate: Did you go into journalism right out of college?

Burke: I went to Southwestern Louisiana Institute for two years and then transferred to the University of Missouri to major in journalism, but ended up in the creative writing program and then got an M.A. My wife Pearl and I were married in grad school and we're still married. And I went to work on the Houston pipeline just like my dad. That's where I wrote most of my first novel, "Half of Paradise," on the pipeline. I carried a notebook with me, because on the pipeline, you go where it goes.

Bankrate: How long were you a pipeliner?

Burke: Not long. I started teaching in 1960 at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. But I did a lot of things after that. I was a land surveyor up in Colorado, and then I was a social worker on Skid Row in South Los Angeles. That was the biggest learning experience of my life. We lived in a rough neighborhood and I learned about a different world.