It’s half eight in the evening and I’m awkwardly cradling a tepid glass of prosecco in a warm room in Cambridge City Hotel. Why am I here? For God’s sake, I’m a Social Anthropologist, I don’t know anything about networking nor will I likely be a management consultant/banker. But the email offering free drinks in the glaring absence of summer plans was all too tempting. For most arts students, graduation prospects present a clear choice: go into the City, or go home. It’s either a life of tapping away in a London office, with a good starting salary and all the esteem that comes from long business lunches, or the alternative – scribbling away in a notebook, at home, wistfully mulling over the chances of (un)employment.

Asking why there is such a divide between the literary and the business life seems rather pointless. But for one man, the choice was never quite as dichotomous. Enter Harry Newman Jr., a Harvard Business School graduate who came to Cambridge in 1946 under an initiative by the American government to help World War II veterans study abroad. While at St John’s, Newman decided that Cambridge needed a proper, independent newspaper. And so, one evening in April 1947 he and others proudly unveiled the first edition of the revived newspaper Varsity. 5,000 copies came churning out of the headquarters in market square excitedly proclaiming about Queen Elizabeth’s II’s upcoming visit to the university. Unfortunately, the visit never took place but Varsity still lives, 800 issues on.

Then, as is the fate for so many of those who dabble in student journalism, the reality of the competitive market hit. After trying to set up a publishing company with a friend in London, by 1955 Newman returned to the US with his pregnant wife and small child to knuckle down and make some money. The rest of the narrative seems straightforward enough. Newman quickly found financial success in the Californian real estate market and by the late 1980s owned a vast conglomerate of malls valued at over $450 million. He lived a comfortable life in Long Beach with his family until his death in 2001.

And yet, a curveball: Harry Newman was not just an amateur-journalist turned millionaire businessman, but also a distinguished and accomplished poet. He began writing in 1972, not about seascapes, or lust, or the wind, but about business. He built his repertoire during snatched hours on intercontinental flights and published his first book ‘Poems for Executives and Other Addicts’ in 1974, before going on to write ‘Male Menopause and Other Cheerful Topics’ in 1979 and ‘Behind Pinstripes’ in 1984. His writings capture the challenges combining work and familial life and the desperate pressure to be perfect. Newman challenges our every idea of what a businessman, or businesswoman is like. We expect confident, arrogant or even greedy executives, and yet we witness in his verse a somewhat delicate, sensitive character faltering through life.

Newman died in 2001, and has a corner dedicated to his memory on the second floor of the English Library. A Cambridge graduate, the founder of a newspaper, an entrepreneur and a poet; he should motivate us to pick up that pen, whether it’s for writing a poem, an article or a CV. The message is clear: no option is off limits, don’t be afraid to experiment and take risks. Be a chemical engineer from 9-5 and sculpt nudes at night. Go to a KPMG breakfast and then write a feature for a student newspaper. At the very least, you may get some poetry out of it.