Even as a kid I knew I’d end up involved in the arts in some way. I was as likely to spend an afternoon cutting up my mom’s Better Homes and Gardens and creating elaborate collages as writing skits my friends and I could perform for each other. But sometime around the fourth grade, my fate was sealed: I read Nancy Drew: The Hidden Staircase, and I knew writing great stories was what I wanted to do. Sadly, it turned out I could only serve one muse, and my collages fell by the wayside.

In The Writer’s Brush (due out next month), Donald Friedman reveals the secret drawings, paintings and sculpture of more than 200 famous writers who found themselves as comfortable at the easel as at the typewriter. Among the writer-artists’ works featured are Marcel Proust’s doodle of a jeune fille from his manuscript for In Search of Lost Time, the manuscript sketches that Fyodor Dostoevsky made of his characters, and Joseph Conrad’s racy pen-and-ink cancan dancers. On the cover of The Writer's Brush: Slyvia Plath's Two Women Reading (tempera).