Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life

Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life

Currey, Mason

Hardcover

Art HistoryLiterary FiguresIndividual Artists

Publisher Price: $30.00

ISBN10: 1250824524
ISBN13: 9781250824523
Publisher: Celadon Books
Published: Mar 31 2026
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.91
Height: 0.93 Width: 6.61 Depth: 9.46
Language: English

Mason Currey is the undisputed master of finding, in the messy lives of great artists and thinkers throughout time, deeply human lessons about cultivating meaning in our current age. --Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of Slow Productivity and Deep Work

Daily Rituals author Mason Currey weaves together delightful, illuminating stories and reflections about how famous artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers throughout history have managed to successfully (or not) support a creative life.

Many of us are drawn to a life in the arts but daunted by how to balance that ambition with the very real need to pay rent and put food on the table. It is impossible to become an accomplished painter, composer, or novelist without spending time experimenting, making false starts, absorbing criticism, reading, talking, and moping about the house. All this time must be purchased, one way or another. Is the history of art and ideas just a history of rich kids?

The answer, of course, is no. William Carlos Williams was a family doctor. Franz Kafka was an insurance man, as were Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens. Grace Hartigan temped. James Joyce mooched off his brother; Christopher Isherwood ingratiated himself with a wealthy uncle. Virginia Woolf and Louisa May Alcott were determined to make their writing pay no matter what. And their material circumstances had an impact on all of their creative outputs.

From family money to jobs to colorful schemes, Mason Currey, author of the acclaimed Daily Rituals, explores both the well-worn and unlikely paths forward for the up-and-coming artist. Making Art and Making a Living is an entertaining and thought-provoking examination of the collision of creative ambitions with real-world necessities and of the messy, glorious, torturous compromises that gifted individuals have patched together when facing the eternal dilemma of an artistic life.

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