Fiction, American Fiction, World Literature, Fiction Subjects

Scumbler

Name: Scumbler
Author: William Wharton
ISBN: 9780062278371

by William Wharton

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Overview

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: craftsmen, 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.

About the Author, William Wharton

William Wharton was born in Philadelphia in 1925. He volunteered for the United States Army and served in France and Germany during World War II. Later in life Wharton returned to France and lived on a houseboat on the Seine. Wharton's first novel, Birdy, won the National Book Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Before his death in 2008 at the age of eighty-two, Wharton published eight novels and three memoirs in the United States.