Just in case you are feeling unappreciated as a writer, I found this little tidbit on the web about one relatively unknown hack --

Michael Crichton was a star basketball player in high school (he was 6' 7" in 10th grade) and he graduated from Roslyn High School in 1960. Crichton then decided to go to Harvard University and become a writer. But Harvard proved to be very disheartening for the young writer. His writing style was severely criticized and his grades hovered around a C. At the age of eighteen he decided that it was Harvard, and not he, that was in error. Convinced of this he hesitatingly retyped an essay of George Orwell's and submitted it as his own. The professor did not catch his plagiarism, and gave Orwell a B-. Crichton was convinced that the Harvard English Department was too hard for him.