After a stint teaching philosophy "briefly and unhappily" at his alma mater, Yale, Sam Savage went on to work as a carpenter, a commercial fisherman, and a letterpress printer, all while he "attempted to write, pretended to write, and often really did write." The perseverance paid off with the publication of his offbeat novel, Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, whose protagonist just happens to be a rat -- albeit a very literary one.