I’ve been looking back at Robert Sheckley’s first short-story collection, Untouched by Human Hands. It was published in 1954, when Sheckley would have been 26 (or maybe only 25, depending on what part of the year the book came out). It includes his classic story “The Monsters,” originally published in F&SF, which I like to reread every couple of years.

But what attracted my attention the most this time was his biographical blurb from the last page, which listed his previous jobs from his first quarter century as:

… a landscape gardener, pretzel salesman, night barman, milkman, warehouseman, and man-of-all-labor in a hand-painted-necktie studio …

Then there were his army jobs:

… 38th Parallel guard, assistant newspaper editor, contracts and payroll clerk, and finally, guitarist in an army dance band.

And finally, the last job before he began to sell his fiction:

… went to work in an aircraft factory as an assistant metallurgist.

This sort of list used to be mandatory for writer bio blurbs, as if a competition existed among writers as to which could most represent himself as a man of the people with real-life experience working the greatest number of blue-collar jobs. But today … not so much. Based on recent blurbs, that sort of listing no longer seems to be a selling point. Pulling a few books down from the shelves at random, I see only information on education, grants, previous credits, earlier editorial positions, and other facts relating specifically to writing. Maybe the tradition still exists in some small percentage of biographical blurbs, but it no longer seems to be the requirement that it once was.

Which made me start thinking of my own non-publishing jobs, which would include busboy in a Brooklyn Jewish deli, cold-calling telephone survey pest, clerk at the New York Public Library, sales manager for an imported beer company, and mortgage loan underwriter. In the mid-’50s, that information might have made its way into a blurb of mine, but no longer.

Do you have any theories as to the reasons for the change? And can we pinpoint exactly when it happened?

Also—what would your long list of odd jobs look like?