Gordon Comstock is a copywriter at an ad agency where his girlfriend Rosemary is a designer. He promptly resigns to become "a poet and a free man." Although many of his friends express reservations, Gordon is not to be detered in his determination to write and lodges in a one-room apartment while working in a bookstore. However, the glamour of being a penniless artist wears off quickly when the rejection slips begin to arrive. Not until Gordon experiences real poverty in a grungy working-class district away from his supportive friends does he grow up and make some real life choices.