Know Scumbler in his poignant, hilarious life. Get mad at him and even cry with him. Here's Don Quixote, Santa Claus, and Faust rolled into one "thick shadow" of a man. A joyous sixty-year-old American street painter lives on the Left Bank in Paris, making a living by creating rentable apartments out of the most unlikely spaces. Mostly, however, he paints with utter delight in the creative act and discovers remarkable characters along his path: crafts-men, students, prostitutes, motorcyclists. He scumbles and fails. He digs ...
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Know Scumbler in his poignant, hilarious life. Get mad at him and even cry with him. Here's Don Quixote, Santa Claus, and Faust rolled into one "thick shadow" of a man. A joyous sixty-year-old American street painter lives on the Left Bank in Paris, making a living by creating rentable apartments out of the most unlikely spaces. Mostly, however, he paints with utter delight in the creative act and discovers remarkable characters along his path: crafts-men, students, prostitutes, motorcyclists. He scumbles and fails. He digs twisting tunnels under Paris streets and builds nests: nature nests, rats' nests, birds' nests. He collects clocks and designs his own life from the "inside." Wanting to be true beyond honesty, visible past seeing to being, Scumbler scrambles, tumbles, rumbles, rambles through the ecstatic pleasure of creation and the pangs of ordinary existence.
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Add this copy of Scumbler to cart. $8.94, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Brownstown, MI, UNITED STATES, published 1996 by William Morrow & Company.
Add this copy of Scumbler to cart. $9.73, good condition, Sold by Solr Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Skokie, IL, UNITED STATES, published 1996 by William Morrow & Company.
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Seller's Description:
Good. The pages are sun faded and slightly yellowing. We flipped through this book and didn't notice any notes or underlines. Minor shelf wear. This is a paperback copy. Fast Shipping-Each order powers our free bookstore in Chicago and sending books to Africa!
I first stumbled on Scumbler by William Wharton while browsing in my local used bookstore. It was the first of Wharton's books for me, and being a traditional picture painter, I found a kindred spirit in his wonderful characterization of the artist as an intensely inventive, driven, and ultimately joyous individual. All of Wharton's books which I have read are written in the first person and appear to be autobiographical, and though they are classified as fictional, they are so convincingly personal that I am always left wondering to what extent his stories are true. Since my first reading of Scumbler, I have bought several copies for friends of mine who are artists. Some have reported, like myself, to have read the entire story in a single day.
