Steve Allen wrote a series of novels where two of the characters are Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows.
Paul Auster wrote himself into City of Glass.
20th Century Dreams, though not quite a novel, is dozens of snippets of fictional stories featuring pivotal historical and cultural figures of the 20th Century, some of whom are still alive.
A recent Salman Rushdie novel–Shalimar the Clown, possibly?–features a character based on Madonna who’s actually named Madonna. It’s not a flattering depiction. Rushdie sent her a copy of the book; she sent it back shredded.
One of my favorite films, Almost Famous, had lots of real and living people (Ben Fong-Torres, David Bowie, the surviving members of Humble Pie) as characters, interacting with roman-a-clef and wholly fictional characters. The real and impersonated Jann Wenner both make brief appearances.
Brett Easton Ellis does a lot of this actually. Jay McInerney turns up in some of his novels and Glamorama has a load of cameos from famous people too.
Science Fiction author James P. Jogan had an interesting take on Time Travel novels – when a real, still-living person appeared in the past in his novel The Proteus Operation, it was because he had contacted that person and gotten their permission to use them (one example – Isaac Asimov). It’s the only time I’ve heard of anyone doing that.
As charmstr has mentioned, W.P. Kinsella used J.D. Salinger as a character in his novel Shoeless Joe* (and, I think, the short story it sprang from, Shoeless Joe goes to Iowa), apparently because Salinger had included characters named Kinsella in his own works. Kinsella didn’t ask Salinger his permission, and Saloinger was reportedly pissed, threatrening legal action if they used his name in any other versions or media, which is why the character in the film Field of Dreams had his name changed to Terence Mann. See the section at the Wikipedia page:
As noted, there have been plenty of real people showing up in time-travel and historical novels. It’s rarer, but not really all that uncommon, for currently living well-known people to appear in (non satirical) works of fiction. Look at how Gary Coleman was a charactrer in the musical Avenue Q.
As for authors showing up in their own works, that happens all the time, too. Clive Cussler shows up in several of his own novels, and two of Phuilip Jose Farmer’s series have featured characters with the initial PJF.
I don’t have the book with me, so I can’t check to see if there are more, but both Anne Rice and Stephen King appear for a bit in House of Leaves.
Well, that didn’t seem to stop Primal Fear, an entire movie (as opposed to a plot point in a larger work) set around the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, a cardinal (not all archbishops are cardinals), as a child molester when there were real-life allegations that the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, a cardinal, (the now-deceased Joseph Cardinal Bernardin) was a child molester. While the movie’s archbishop didn’t have the same name, it’s the same real office and real city.
The Winshaw Legacy, or, Oh, What a Carve Up! includes Margaret Thatcher as a character, in addition to mentioning many other real people.
Although it embarrasses me to admit I read this, Dating Big Bird has Demi Moore in a scene.
John Steinbeck showed up in East of Eden, and, IIRC, he was alive when East of Eden was written.
IIRC there was a character in the John le Carré book The Constant Gardener who is real. The bush pilot that takes them around. Le Carré got to know him while visiting the area and decided to include him, real name and all, into the book, just as garrilous he is in real life.
In A Deeper Blue, John Ringo’s “hero” the Kildar several times expresses his desire to shove the nuke they acquired up Putin’s ass in repayment for a betrayal by the Russian leader. For that matter, Clive Cussler has made a habit of inserting himself (thinly disguised) into his novels.
That reminds me of The Queen and I, a novel by Sue Townsend (most famous for the Adrian Mole books) in which the royal family is forced to live on a council estate (like normal people) after a republican revolution.
There are a few real Dubliners scattered throughout Ulysses, among them the publican Davy Byrne and scholars George Russell (A.E.) and Richard Irvine Best. The latter, at least, was irritated by it.
In Dante’s Inferno, Dante meets two men in the 9th circle of Hell who were still alive at the time, Fra Albergio and Branca Doria. They explain that their crime, the murder of a guest, is so heinous that those who commit it are immediately sent to Hell, and a demon possesses the body that still lives in the mortal world.
IIRC there are other examples in Dante’s Inferno as well.
In keeping with the tradition, when Larry niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote their own take on it, inferno, they stuck in references to now-living celebrities undergoing eternal punishment in Hell, although not naming them. One of these was Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., easily recognized by their description of his writing, and his gravestone with a flashing neon sign: SO IT GOES…SO IT GOES…SO IT GOES…
They also have a thinly-disguised Forrest J. Ackerman and, I think, an L. Ron Hubbard.
Do graphic novels get extra points for showing the real-life folks? WATCHMEN had Nixon, Ford, Kissinger, Liddy, even Jackie O and John F Kennedy Jr…
Elizabeth Taylor appears in J.G. Ballard’s Crash as the target of an attempted murder, and in his Atrocity Exhibition as the subject of a clinical description of a facelift.
Does “Mick Crowley” in Michael Crichton’s Next count?
The Girl Who Played With Fire features Swedish boxer (now TV host) Paolo Roberto. He plays himself in the movie, too. He’s inordinately cute.
In Larry McMurtry’s Baja Oklahoma, Willie Nelson makes a surprise entrance at the protagonist’s concert, singing the hit song she wrote (“Baja Oklahoma”).
Anyone still-living at the time wasn’t depicted by name. But Earl Comstock was clearly based on Robert S. McNamara (Comstock worked as a businessman, founded an intelligence agency, was considered responsible for getting the US into Vietnam). A few other characters may have some partial basis on real-life people, but none quite so prominent as him.
Other real-life things were altered for the sake of fiction (like Finux for Linux, ETC for IBM, or Ordo as a PGP-like setup) and some as a joke (Qwghlm as a nigh-unpronounceable version of the islands around Britain, or G.E.B. Kivistik as a nod to Douglas Hofstadter).
I just finished Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. A character refers to Jeffrey Dahmer as having been one of the ‘monsters’ they are hunting.
Kinky Friedman’s mysteries include himself, and Willie Nelson.