write for the drawer

present singular third person writes for the drawer · participle present writing for the drawer · past wrote for the drawer · participle past written for the drawer

1. idiomaticTo write a work for posterity or for friends that one cannot publish except as samizdat.

   Since I first began to write I had to write for the drawer.

   2016, Our Mythical Childhood, page 351

   2 more examples

   It was a middle-aged intellectual crowd. Publishers who abandoned their writers, writers who wrote for the drawer, artists who had become wealthy by turning Social Realism into kitsch.

   2013, Martin Cruz Smith, Tatiana: An Arkady Renko Novel, page 19

   It seemed suddenly miraculous that she was here, in America, holding in her hands a book that she had written for the drawer four years earlier in Moscow.

   2015, Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter, →ISBN, pages 341–342