Kurt Vonnegut
In the mid 1950s, Vonnegut worked for Sports Illustrated magazine for a very short time. He was asked to write about a racehorse that had jumped a fence and tried to run away.  Vonnegut stared at the blank piece of paper on his typewriter all morning. Then, he typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and left.  He was almost going to quit writing, but the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop asked him to teach. While he was there, Cat's Cradle became a best-seller, and he began Slaughterhouse-Five. That book is now called one of the best American novels of the 20th century. It is on the 100 best lists of Time magazine and the Modern Library. In 1961, he published the famous short story Harrison Bergeron.