Making Art and Making a Living

Announcing my next book, out 3/31/26

Update: Making Art and Making a Living is out now! Order it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Powell’s, or your local bookstore. Keep scrolling to read my original pre-publication announcement ↓

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Patient readers! Two hundred and thirty weeks ago, I shared the Publishers Marketplace deal announcement for my next book, and declared my intention of completing said project within thirteen months so that it could arrive in your hands in the spring of 2023. Oh, how the gods must have smiled! As close readers of this newsletter know, I then proceeded to stumble into thickets of self-doubt so murky that I several times thought seriously about abandoning the project altogether—but I’m so glad I didn’t, because all that doubtful murky stumbling eventually led someplace, and here’s where it led:

Coming 3/31/26! Cover design by Evan Gaffney

Making Art and Making a Living is a book about a dilemma and how some brilliant people have solved it, or tried to. The dilemma is, of course, how to be true to one’s deepest creative impulses while at the same time paying for the necessities of day-to-day life. It’s not so easy! As I write in the introduction:

It is simply not possible to become an accomplished painter or musician or novelist or poet without spending a lot of time experimenting, making false starts, starting over, starting over again, absorbing criticism, thinking, reading, talking, and mooning about the house aimlessly. All this time has to be purchased, one way or another.

How one purchases this time—well, that’s what the book is about, and I look into the financial lives of a variety of groundbreaking creative artists to see how they did it: what choices they made, how they thought about those choices, and how their choices influenced the work they produced and their larger careers.

The cast of characters includes many of my personal favorite writers and artists from the last couple hundred years: Chantal Akerman, Charles Baudelaire, John Cage, Paul Cézanne, Jean-Luc Godard, Grace Hartigan, James Joyce, dear old Franz Kafka, Lee Krasner, Bernadette Mayer, Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, and about thirty others. The strategies they employed included clerking at a bank (miserably), working at the construction site of the world’s largest dam, stealing and reselling valuable first-edition books, stripping at sailor bars, endlessly hitting up family members for loans, going on television game shows, selling insurance, selling mutual funds, selling encyclopedias door-to-door, selling organic cookies, breeding Old English bobtail sheepdogs, practicing family medicine, gambling, shoplifting, mopping hospital floors, taking tickets at the Museum of Modern Art, and many more subtle and not-so-subtle maneuvers. If, like me, you’ve always wondered how the heck anyone ever afforded to be a writer or an artist, and how they kept up their energy and optimism in the face of all the compromises and code-shifting that this requires—I feel confident you’ll enjoy the stories I’ve assembled here.

Making Art and Making a Living comes out March 31, 2026, and is now available for pre-order from Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon. Pre-orders tell publishers, booksellers, and the larger book world what upcoming titles deserve their attention and promotional energy—so while I know that ordering a book seven months early feels a little silly, it would mean the world to me if you’d consider putting your money on my long-simmering romp through artists’ and writers’ financial lives.

Here’s what a few early readers have to say about it:

“A wonderfully readable, anecdote-filled tour of the inventive and sometimes eyebrow-raising ways artists through history have sought to transcend the everyday while also paying the bills. Mason Currey never tells the reader what to do—creativity is too personal for that—but there’s vast inspiration, and consolation, in these pages.”
—Oliver Burkeman, New York Times bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks

“In my twenty years of university teaching, it has never ceased to amaze me how many young people harbor dreams of a creative life but assume they cannot both do what they want and earn what they need. Enter Mason Currey, a world-class obsessive who in this latest masterpiece invites us to walk alongside painters, poets, musicians, and others as they find their own unique ways to put food on the table and a roof over their heads while making their art. Exquisitely crafted, it’s a book I would recommend to anyone hoping to pursue a creative career despite the absence of a large trust fund.”
―Angela Duckworth, New York Times bestselling author of Grit

“A delicious peek at the rich husbands, family money, business schemes, and desk jobs that really filled famous artists’ bank accounts, this book is a balm for anyone who has ever fretted that they are not a ‘real’ artist because they don’t pay their bills with their art.”
—Ann Friedman, co-author of Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close

“I didn’t think Mason Currey could top Daily Rituals—but with his thorough research and his lively rendering of great artists and their lives, he’s proved me wrong. Making Art and Making a Living is a riveting, incisive, and instructive book that illuminates the material conditions that creators across the ages have lived through, which reveals the depth of their commitment to the artistic vocation. From Petrarch to Van Gogh to contemporary writers crowd-funding their work on the Internet, Currey shows the effort required to realize one’s talent—making those feats of creation all the more inspiring. Come for the lessons in enduring for the sake of one’s art. Stay for the strange and delightful anecdotes, the confessional letters, and the gossipy journal entries that feel like the best kind of eavesdropping.”
—Suleika Jaouad, New York Times bestselling author of Between Two Kingdoms and The Book of Alchemy

“By telling the stories of creative people in the past, Mason Currey gives readers a wider range of possibilities for the future. I always find much to steal from his books.”
—Austin Kleon, New York Times bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist

“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

Those are gratifying, but what’s been really gratifying, throughout the entire research and writing process, has been testing out some of my ideas—and venting some of my frustrations—with an audience of thoughtful, engaged, and generous readers, i.e. all of you. Thank you for being here, thank you for your patience and enthusiasm, and thank you for pre-ordering the book, I dearly hope you enjoy it.