Writers may be nature's natural legislators, but that's not the way to bet.

 British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81), who wrote 19 of his 26 books while in office, and one novel during his premiership

Two hundred and eleven members of the 113th Congress listed law as their occupation. The 113th also included numerous entrepreneurs, physicians, engineers, clergy, teachers, farmers, and accountants, as well as a rodeo announcer, a vintner, a comedian, a firefighter, a welder, a fruit picker, a football player, a fisherman, and a mortician Not a single member claimed a literary calling. Many members of the Senate and the House of Representatives—as well as presidents, governors, and mayors—have written books, or at least pretended to have written them. Ghostwritten memoirs published to coincide with campaigns are the tribute ambitious yahoos pay to literate houyhnhnms. But the office a professional writer seeks is most often merely a space in which to write. 

Despite the fact that the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that there were 129,100 writers in the United States in 2012 (a number easily exceeding the populations of rodeo announcers and vintners), it is an extraordinary event when a writer becomes a candidate, and it is almost apocalyptic when one succeeds. Especially in the United States, where Adlai Stevenson was mocked as an “egghead” for being seen with a book and Sarah Palin’s apparent indifference to reading embellished her credentials as a populist foe of “elitism,” bookishness is usually a liability. So alien are books and reading to American notions of political power that Henry Kissinger, an intellectual courtier who himself never ran for office, was astonished to find books not only bursting out of the shelves of Mao Zedong’s study but piled on a table and the floor as well. “It looked more the retreat of a scholar than the audience room of the all-powerful leader of the world’s most populous nation,” Kissinger recalled. According to a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts, a mere 50.2 percent of Americans of voting age read at least one novel, short story, poem, or play in a year, and they apparently do not like to read the names of writers on their ballots.

For the rest of this fascinating article on writers who ran for office, click here.