I'm looking for a one-to-two word adjective that describes a person that was once rich, but after several unfortunate events has much less money. However, the person is not suffering, but the person is no longer living an affluent life.
The word is going to be used in a title: [Adjective] Author.
"Formerly rich" or even "once rich" as used the question would do the job, either of these would imply that they're no longer rich.
e.g. The formerly rich author now lives in a modest home.
Impoverished
reduced to poverty
- an impoverished family/community (M-W)
Here is a French caricature from the 18th century with the title
Caricature of the impoverished author (L'Auteur tombé)
And in his book, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (2000), Andrew Gyory writes:
A third hand found at the table was Mark Twain, whom Stewart hired as his secretary while the impoverished author struggled to finish his first book, The Innocents Abroad.
"Ruined" can be used in this sense.
bankrupt[ed], impoverish[ed]
ruined by stock speculation
You may find beggared a useful term.
Cambridge
beggared. past participle of beggar
beggar verb
to make a person or organization, etc. extremely poor
Cambridge goes on to give examples, among which we find:
• His parents beggared themselves, grew old before their time, striving with every nerve to clear and vindicate their son's name.
• The case may go on for some days and the person who loses may find himself almost beggared.
• To-day they are beggared and penniless.
Hence, in Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens Gutenberg we find the following passage that refers to the many people who are about to discover they have been impoverished by the financial consequences of the death of Mr Merdle:
"... if all those hundreds and thousands of beggared people who were yet asleep could only know, as they two spoke, the ruin that impended over them, what a fearful cry against one miserable soul would go up to Heaven!"
I would add to the good choices already put forward,
lowered in condition, power, or dignity; abased.
Not quite as specific, but descriptive of a person who has been brought low.
You might consider the reverse of the popular idiom from rags to riches, defined as:
from a state of having very little money to a state of having a lot of money
In your case, the author went from riches to rags, as used, for instance, in this NBC article:
Riches-to-rags stories: Fallen billionaires. Everyone is always talking about how the rich are getting richer — and it’s usually true. But not always.
I know that you are looking for a one-or-two word adjectival construct, but I think that you will find that the absolute best expression for your exact meaning is "come down in the world". It captures your intent exactly, for which reason I post it here as an answer, hopefully useful to you or to another with similar needs.
to have less money or a worse social position than you had before: They used to live in a big house with lots of servants, but they've come down in the world since then.
To use it in your intended title would require reworking it as an appositive or an aside, but could be done.
Perhaps something like... The Author, (Recently) Come Down in the World
Other answers have several suggestions, but most suggest the person is now poor, rather than merely brought down to the same level as the rest of us. Reduced is a possibility, though The Reduced Author does not make it clear that it is the Author's finances that are reduced. Straitened is another possibility; the word is so often used in the expression straitened circumstances that it may be associated with reduced finances in a title like The Straitened Author.
If you are looking for something more formal and sociological, downwardly mobile is another possible term, an adjectival phrase, with the equivalent noun phrase downward mobility. Collins dictionaries identifies it as a sociology term, defining it as "experiencing downward mobility". Mobility is a sociological term meaning "movement within or between classes and occupations". Hence it refers to someone moving from a higher sociological class (e.g. the upper class) to a lower class (e.g. the working class).
The phrase is found in academic works: "The Downwardly Mobile", a chapter in Jessi Streib, Privilege Lost, Oxford Academic, 2020.
But you can also see it in publications for a general audience: Lynn Steger Strong, "We're broke, not poor: how I became downwardly mobile", The Guardian (London), Tue 3 Dec 2019. A quote:
According to a 2016 study on social mobility, 50% of Americans born in the 1980s are set to end up worse off than their parents were. Downward mobility is a relatively new thing for middle-class white people in this country.
"Reduced circumstances" is the closest phrase I know of, although that does not work well for your title. "Formerly wealthy", "formerly rich", "formerly prosperous", or "newly poor" might work better, but seem fairly dull to me. Rather than describing the author's current state, though, the title might be punchier if the adjective describes how they arrived in that state: "profligate", "unlucky", "betrayed", "lazy".
If you are interested in dated words you could use distressed. The advantage is that distressed meant exactly what you are trying to express.
If you want confirmation of this look at the origins of the charity called Elizabeth Finn Care. As the website says Elizabeth Finn Care was originally set up in the late nineteenth century by Elizabeth Finn and her daughter Constance as The Distressed Gentlefolk's Aid Association to help people who were originally more or less wealthy but were in what were then known as reduced circumstances.
There are words to describe this status of being an individual (or of a family) that had been rich in the past but is now - relatively, at least - poor.
Peter's "reduced" (or "now reduced") is one. As is "erstwhile", "diminished", "fallen", "nouveau pauvre" (if you don't object to a French phrase), etc.
You tend to find these epithets in magazine articles, historical or biographical books on such people.
Just to add to the answer by @fev.
If you are referring to a company or organisation, then insolvent is generally the preferred adjective to "impoverished". Cambridge dictionary provides the following definition:
Definition: (especially of a company) unable to pay what you owe because you do not have enough money
Example Sentence: "When it discovered the loans could not be repaid, the bank became insolvent."
The words "bankrupt" and "bust" can be used as (informal) synonyms.
Note: none of these words are exclusive to corporations and so it is perfectly legitimate to use them to describe an individual (or individuals) as well.
Therefore, the title could be "Bankrupt [insert author's name]" to refer back to your specific scenario
You could consider "déclassé", for which Merriam-Webster gives the first definition as:
fallen or lowered in class, rank, or social position
From the definition and examples in French the word clearly can be and is used to refer to persons whose social status has been downgraded, however in English usually it appears to be more often used to refer to activities or behaviors that are associated with the lower classes.
For that context, perhaps "down on his luck":
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/down+on+his+luck
Short of cash or credit. A nineteenth-century description of financial embarrassment, usually of a temporary nature, this term implies, with down, that the person so described at one time had more resources. Thus Thackeray wrote, “The Chevalier was. . . . to use his own picturesque expression, ‘down on his luck’” (Pendennis, 1849).
While it may have been coined in the nineteenth century, it still has currency to this day. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=down+on+his+luck suggests it peaked in usage around 1900, and again recently.
As many answers here may imply too-far a fall from riches, perhaps:
If it was not a recent change to their status, I like:
...as it gives a subtle alliteration that is not obvious in the spelling.
You could make use of statistical terminology.
For example if the move were rich to average wealth, something like "financially normalised" might make sense, although it's probably not not going to make the most exhilarating title unless it's in a specialist domain.
"The word is going to be used in a title: [Adjective] Author."
For this difficult request, the only thing I can come up with is: "The Once-Rich Writer"
Remembering that Clever Copywriters Always Alliterate, The once-rich writer happily alliterates, but "The Once-Rich Author" is also ok.
One possibility is Dissipated which describes one who has fallen victim to the usual temptations of life. This was used to describe Benjamin Franklin when he was older and had spent several years in France. He was no longer the industrious hard worker he had started out to be but a great party goer and womanizer.
One of the definitions of usurp is:
to take the place of by or as if by force (Webster)
another is:
To use and assume the coat of arms of another person.(Wiktionary)
Given the general association of this word with royalty, using this word will imply:
I also think it makes a pretty good book title.
