Barbara Kingsolver says she almost threw away her first novel. It was 1986 and she was pregnant with her first child when she dove into writing it to occupy her pregnancy-induced insomniac hours, working in the closet of a one-room cabin in Arizona so she wouldn’t disturb her sleeping husband. She didn’t think of herself as a fiction writer, but she sent the completed manuscript to an agent anyway, with an apologetic note saying she thought this might be a novel. That manuscript became The Bean Trees, which is now a mainstay in school curricula and been translated into several dozen languages.