The Misfortune 500

When I first started out in my working career, I made it the habit of obtaining jobs with companies that were about to go under. (I wrote more books while on unemployment than by any other method.) I was a real bloodhound at sniffing out the pre-dawn odor of failure exuding from crumbling company ledgers. Wall Street types took to tailing me around to see where the next soft spot was about to occur in the economy. Give me a Recession and I was right in there for that dizzying downward spiral. Then, ah, Unemployment, great muse to the literary foot soldier.