A history of making art and making a living—of patrons, day jobs, side hustles, strategic marriages, petty theft, palace intrigue, and other adventures in funding a creative life, featuring writers, artists, composers, and performers from the Renaissance to Late Capitalism. In a dozen chapters, focusing on a particularly fertile moment in art, literature, or music (or all three at once), Mason Currey unpacks the socio-economic conditions that created that milieu – cheap cost of living, a sudden boom in disposable wealth, new technologies, changing social mores – and describes how the era’s major and minor figures navigated the creative economy while staying true to their artistic visions. The result is both a wealth of entertaining, quirky, surprising, and inspiring individual stories and a chronological progression through history, with a chance to reflect on how concepts like patronage, state sponsorship of the arts, ‘selling out,’ and so on have morphed over time.