How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship, and Musical Theater. How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship, and Musical Theater is a 2004 teen novel, the first by American author Marc Acito.
The story centers on Edward Zanni, a 17-year-old high school senior living in New Jersey, USA in the early 1980s, whose ambition to ascend to the Juilliard School in New York City to study acting is quashed when his father refuses to pay his tuition fees. The novel won the Oregon Book Awards' Ken Kesey Award for Best Novel in 2005,[1] and received generally favourable reviews.