Laurence Sterne

Sterne spent two decades as an obscure Yorkshire vicar, prone to hemorrhaging lungs, before publishing the first volumes of Tristram Shandy at forty-six and becoming London's literary sensation overnight: dining with lords, sitting for Reynolds, watching the book run through edition after edition even as reviewers called it indecent and mad.

He kept the joke going for nine years and seven more volumes, weaving in Locke's theory of association, a marbled page, a black page for a death, a squiggled diagram of the plot's digressions. A Sentimental Journey, his last book, appeared weeks before tuberculosis finally killed him in 1768, in lodgings he could barely afford.