5 Famous Literary Recluses (Besides J.D. Salinger)

Dickinson lived out most of her 56 years in the same house in Amherst, Mass., rarely leaving the property in the final decades of her life. She authored almost 2,000 poems but only published a handful, and those she did were published anonymously. Dickinson never married, and legend has it she spoke to visitors through her front door and attended her father's funeral by sitting in the next room, listening to the ceremony.

Family deaths and his own poor health turned this French author, once a social butterfly and frequenter of Parisian salons, into a shut-in who attempted to block out all light and sound from his apartment. During those last 17 years of his life, Proust spent most of his time working on his epic, 3,200-page In Search of Lost Time.

Although this author of Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49 lives in New York, he manages to maintain a reclusive lifestyle. His private ways have become such an item of speculation that New York magazine does a piece on Pynchon's lifestyle every so often.

Lee's 1961 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird has ascended to the pantheon of young adult fiction, but this novelist herself hasn't been seen much of late. Since the publication of her one and only novel, she has avoided reporters, though she did give an interview back in 2006 while attending a ceremony. (The interview prompted the New York Times to run the headline: "Harper Lee, Gregarious for a Day.") Lee also turned out to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 — it seems the president is a big enough name to get this notoriously shy author to come out of her shell.

This two-time Booker winner didn't show up to receive either of his awards (that's some dedicated reclusiveness) and shies away from giving interviews. The South African author, who penned the famously steely prose of Disgrace and Life and Times of Michael K, has also won a Nobel prize and has a new book out this year, called The Childhood of Jesus.