Podcast
The Daily Stoic
Ryan Holiday considers this novel about a corrupt boxer and his publicist one of his all-time favorites. He credits it with inspiring him to leave the marketing world and pursue writing and Stoicism.
This is one of my all time favorite books, The Harder They Fall by Bud Schulberg. It's this novel about this corrupt boxer and a public relations agent.
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Ryan Holiday considers this novel about a corrupt boxer and his publicist one of his all-time favorites. He credits it with inspiring him to leave the marketing world and pursue writing and Stoicism.
This is one of my all time favorite books, The Harder They Fall by Bud Schulberg. It's this novel about this corrupt boxer and a public relations agent.
And I remember reading this book and I remembered it having changed my life. So I reread it recently. I thought it was the book that spurred me to leave the sort of corrupt, broken marketing world behind and become a writer.
I was just racking up gradually instead of all at once. Like Gus Leonard, a boxer who figured to take an awful beating from Stein for $65,000, coast through the Toro fix for an easy $36,000 and then live out his days on a farm like a country squire.
I was just thinking like a moon struck freshman when I was out there on the edge of town deciding to blow Nick off. That's a corrupt mobster. He says this wasn't selling out. This was just playing it smart. And I even wrote here, I said, is it? Is this you? That's what I wrote to myself.
I know the goddamn trouble with me. I have enough brains to see it and not enough guts to stand up to it. Thousands of us, millions of us, corrupted, rootless, career-ridden, good hearts and yellow bellies, living out our lives for the easy buck, the soft birth, indulging ourselves in the illusion that we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch.