Working Titles: Memoir of an American Hustler

Peter Belz is an American author whose life has been shaped by work in all its messy, un-glamorous forms. Over six decades he has held sixty‑six jobs, including fishmonger, janitor, bartender, café owner, salesman, actor, and fuel tanker driver. Each one left a mark, sometimes useful, sometimes painful, always instructive.

His memoir, Working Titles: Memoir of an American Hustler, tells that story job by job, tracing a working‑class life built through restaurants, warehouses, bars, offices, and long miles of highway. It is not a book about career ladders or tidy reinvention. It is about endurance, improvisation, and the strange education that comes from doing whatever work is in front of you.

Belz also writes fiction. His novella Here Boy! follows a working actor and barista whose senses become unnaturally sharp after a minor accident, drawing him into the private troubles of strangers and the quiet suffering people learn to hide. His fiction, like his nonfiction, stays close to ordinary lives and the moral weight of paying attention.

Born in Baltimore and now based in Pennsylvania, Belz divides his time between writing and work. He is drawn to stories about labor, perception, and the small decisions that quietly shape who people become.