I am really confused by "non-commercial" as well. Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were professional writers in the modern sense. Hemingway started off as a newspaper reporter. F. Scott Fitzgerald was a Hollywood screenplay writer.

Yeah. It is a very amorphous constraint. Also what does "ended up happy" mean? Does Victor Hugo count? He was celebrated by the masses, had a long-long and productive life. But he had the misfortune of outliving his spouse, and by all accounts he was quite lonely in his last years. Does that count as "ended up happy"?

Or what about Terry Pratchett? As far as I know he died surrounded by his loved ones. But he died due to Alzheimer's disease, which must have been terrifying.

But if we can't call someone as successful as Victor Hugo or Terry Pratchett "non-commercial" then maybe someone obscure? Do you need to be published to be a writer? I don't think so. My friend's dad wrote a really funny, and heartfelt story about the history of their family. Never published it, probably nobody will publish it ever. I still count him as a writer. And he died surrounded by friends and family. Does that count as "ended up happy"?

Nobody knows your friend’s dad. How are we supposed to guess if he ended up happy? If we use Kerouac and F. Scott Fitzgerald as examples of people who did not end up happy, maybe he did. Or maybe he died totally miserable pining for a woman he met when he was 14. We don’t know and that’s the great mystery of strangers.

It doesn’t help your comment much to start off talking about amorphous constraints when you conclude with something even more amorphous.

And finally, I’m sure they’re talking about literary fiction.

> Nobody knows your friend’s dad.

What an astute observation. Almost as if you got my point. Some writers are unknown to the whole world.

> How are we supposed to guess if he ended up happy?

I didn't ask if he did. I asked if what I described counts as "ended up happy"?

> It doesn’t help your comment much to start off talking about amorphous constraints when you conclude with something even more amorphous.

Perhaps if you give it an other read you will realise that what I'm doing is unpacking what I find amorphous about the question. Who is a writer? Who can we truly say that they have ended up happy? So yes, of course you will find much ambiguity in my answer.

But if you can't handle it imagine that all I said: Victor Hugo, Terry Pratchett.

> But he died due to Alzheimer's disease, which must have been terrifying.

I wonder. Having had a parent go through this, one of the small mercies, at least for them, was that they themselves were not aware of what was happening. Their world felt normal to them. Instead, they thought everything and everyone else around them was becoming confused, crazy and hostile.

But then, this is just one data point. As they say, when you have seen one case of dementia, you have seen one case of dementia.