Marlon Brando once said, “I live in my cat’s house.”

He had a real love for felines, and gave a big movie break to a stray that was found by director Francis Ford Coppola on the set of The Godfather. Brando held the tabby in his lap throughout the opening scene, and people have thought it intentional brilliance ever since, reading symbolism into the hidden claws and softening the first impression of a mafia boss.

One of most important and influential writers in history, Charles Dickens once said: “What greater gift than the love of a cat?” He would sit entranced for hours while writing, but when his furry friends needed some attention, they were notorious for extinguishing the flame on his desk candle. In 1862, he was so upset after the death of his favorite cat, Bob, that he had the feline’s paw stuffed and mounted to an ivory letter opener. He had the opener engraved saying, “C.D., In memory of Bob, 1862” so he could have a constant reminder of his old friend. The letter opener is now on display at the Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library.

Mark Twain—the great humorist and man of American letters—was also a great cat lover. ‘I simply can’t resist a cat, particularly a purring one. They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course.’ Twain kept eleven cats at his farm in Connecticut.  When his beloved black cat Bambino went missing, Twain took out an advertisement in the New York American offering a $5 reward to return the missing cat to his house at 21 Fifth Avenue in New York City. It decribed Bambino as “Large and intensely black; thick, velvety fur; has a faint fringe of white hair across his chest; not easy to find in ordinary light.”

The feline protagonists in Stephen King’s novels lead haunted lives. In Pet Sematary, King tells a story of loss inspired by his family’s own tragic experience with their pet cat Smucky who was hit by a car. King’s cat-filled publicity photo for the movie Cat’s Eye, based on several of the author’s short stories, proves that the author’s fascination with the macabre didn’t stop him from being a cat magnet. This famous cat-lover wrote that ‘it might be that the biggest division in the world isn’t men and women but folks who like cats and folks who like dogs.’ The Shawshank Redemption author has owned several pets over the years, including “a rather crazed Siamese cat” named Pear.

‘The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself,” says William Burroughs, who is known for his wild, drug-induced writings, but he had a softer side as well—especially when it came to his cats. He penned an autobiographical novella, The Cat Inside, about the cats he owned throughout his life, and the final journal entry Burroughs wrote before he died referred to the pure love he had for his four pets: “Only thing can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner, and Calico. Pure love. What I feel for my cats present and past. Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.”

Aside from peppering his high Modernist poetry with allusions to feline friends, T.S. Eliot wrote a book of light verse called Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a collection of 15 poems, dedicated to his godchildren, regarding the different personalities and eccentricities of cats. Names like Old Deuteronomy, the Rum Tum Tugger, and Mr. Mistoffelees should be familiar to people all around the world—the characters and poems were the inspiration for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running Broadway musical, Cats. Later publications of Old Possum’s included illustrations by noted artist Edward Gorey—yet another avid cat lover. You can listen to Eliot read “The Naming of Cats” here.

Ernest Hemingway and his family initially became infatuated with cats while living at Finca Vigía, their house in Cuba. During the writer’s travels, he was gifted a six-toed (or polydactyl) cat he named Snowball. Hemingway liked the little guy so much that in 1931, when he moved into his now-famous Key West home, he let Snowball run wild, creating a small colony of felines that populated the grounds. Today, some 40 to 50 six-toed descendants of Snowball are still allowed to roam around the house. Polydactyl felines are sometimes called “Hemingway Cats.”

American writer Ernest Hemingway is probably the most famous cat lover in the literary world, along with Mark Twain (who took his love of cats to such an extent that he refused to be friends with people who didn’t like cats and rented cats when he was on tour and couldn’t take his own cats with him).

Many of you are probably familiar with the Hemingway House in Key West, Florida, which is home to about 60 cats. Hemingway’s first polydactyl cat, named Snow, was given to him by a captain and marked the beginning of his love for these animals.

Many of the cats that live at the Hemingway House today are descendants of Snow and are well cared for by the staff there. It’s a fantastic place for literature and cat lovers. All Hemingway cats after Snow were named after famous people (Mark Twain was one of them, as he was Hemingway’s literary role model) – a tradition that the Hemingway House continues to this day.

“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: people can hide their feelings for some reason, but a cat cannot.” – Ernest Hemingway

In 2007, Bowen, a recovering drug addict, found an injured Bob curled up on a step when he himself was living in sheltered accommodation. “He gave me this look, almost saying, ‘help’, but also ‘sort it out’,” said the author today. Bowen nursed Bob back to health, only to find the cat following him everywhere he went, even joining him when he busked and sold the Big Issue. The pair became well-known in London, going on to attract the attention of a literary agent, who sold Bowen’s story of how, with Bob’s help, he would get over his addictions to heroin and methadone, to Hodder & Stoughton. It also inspired two films.

Bob the cat died in June 2020.

Known to be a general cat lover during his life, this 18th century jack-of-all-trades was immortalized in James Boswell’s proto-biography The Life of Samuel Johnson.

The Osaragi Jirō Memorial Museum in Yokohama, Japan is dedicated to the author Jirō Osaragi and features numerous cat ornaments as an integral part of its feline-themed decor. Osaragi wrote several novels connected to Yokohama, including Gento (Magic Lantern) and lived at the Hotel New Grand for over 10 years (in room 318). It’s often said that the Shōwa-period author cared for over 500 cats throughout his lifetime at his home in Kamakura, Japan—which is sometimes open to the public. Visitors can lounge on Osaragi’s terrace and sip tea while picturing the hundreds of semi-feral cats that once frolicked in the gardens.

Ray Bradbury compared parts of the writer’s creative process to cat ownership, saying that ideas, like cats, “come silently in the hour of trying to wake up and remember my name.”

His advice for writers?

“Treat ideas like cats … make them follow you.” 

In his short story, The Cat’s Pajamas, two cat lovers fight over who will keep a stray cat they find in the middle of a California highway.

Though not overt, William Yeats’s love for cats can be found in poems like “The Cat and the Moon,” where he uses the image of a cat to represent himself and the image of the moon to represent his muse Maude Gonne, a high society-born feminist and sometime actress who inspired the poet throughout his life.

The poem references Gonne’s cat named Minnaloushe, who sits and stares at the changing moon. Yeats metaphorically transforms himself into the cat longing for his love that is indifferent to him, and the heartsick feline poet wonders whether Gonne will ever change her mind. Too bad for Yeats; Maude Gonne never agreed to marry him, despite the fact that he asked for her hand in marriage—four separate times.

Raymond Chandler had an immense influence on detective fiction and came to define the tenets of hard-boiled noir. He used femme fatales, twisting plots, and whip-cracking wordplay in his evocative classics starring the detective Philip Marlowe, including The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. But it wasn’t all serious business for Chandler because—you guessed it—he really loved cats. His cat Taki gave him endless enjoyment, but also occasionally got on his nerves.

Here’s a passage from a letter Chandler wrote to a friend about Taki: