A Society Where Artists Can’t Make Any Money

I had never seriously thought about how writers made money, until I began writing myself. I’d read about the starving artists of the past, of course: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is now considered one of the great masterpieces of American literature, but when Melville passed away at 72, the novel was out of print and even misspelled in his obituary. And the composer Philip Glass was a part-time plumber and taxi driver—while his work was being performed at the Metropolitan Opera in NYC. (As Ted Gioia notes, Glass spent two decades working blue-collar jobs, until he could afford to compose full-time.)