Schrödinger’s Writer: Craving Life as a Starving Artist

A hallmark of a civilized society is that (most) people know how to read and write. This certainly wasn’t always the case. In the Western world, literacy was limited to the ruling classes until the early 18th century, when the Age of Enlightenment spurred reading and writing education for the general public. By the 19th century, mass printing had allowed books and magazines to become a regular…