It’s too late.
Robert Crum says old people in general don’t have literary careers. After 40, you’re done.
Keats when he wrote On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer: 21.
Shakespeare when he wrote Venus and Adonis: not yet 30. Hamlet: 36.
Dickens when Pickwick Papers was published: 25.
J.D. Salinger published The Catcher In The Rye at: 32.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise came out when he was: 24. The Great Gatsby: 29.
The great exception: Fyodor Dostoevsky. Wrote Crime and Punishment at 45, The Brothers Karamazov at 59. By which time he should’ve been dead. At 27 he was arrested, thrown in jail, and sentenced to death. As he was waiting outside in the freezing cold to be executed by firing squad, his sentence was commuted to four years’ exile with hard labor in Siberia. Then he spent five years as a soldier in what is now Kazakhstan. After that he ran literary journals that failed. He was a compulsive gambler and a depressive. And between the ages of 41 and 59 he wrote The House of the Dead, Notes From Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Take that all you spoiled, comfortable dilettantes.
“God’s lonely man”. Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver was inspired by Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
January 20th, 2009 at 05:07
Ey, didn’t Nobel-prize winnin’ Portuguese novelist, José Saramago start after his 40’s? (To be honest, his books aren’t exactly a page- turner for me, but….)
January 20th, 2009 at 11:17
To hell with age! I just turned 39. And I still remain hopeful that a book authored by me is still possible by next year. I have written quite a lot of poetry. Bad poetry? Good poetry? I am scared to know.
January 20th, 2009 at 17:30
For me, the greatest writer who ever lived, and one of the most influential. He was to Mental Illness films what Dickens was to hokey telenovellas. If anyone wants an introductory work, you’d best start with Notes from Underground or Crime and Punishment. Stay away from a Constance Garnett translation, though. Her prose is quite uninspired.
And my motto?
“Write early, publish late.”
January 21st, 2009 at 09:06
I’m sure there are many exceptions. Alfred Wight, aka James Herriot started writing at 50 and had a successful literary career.
January 21st, 2009 at 23:48
There is something noble and heroic about youthful accomplishments, and in dying young. That’s why Rizal is our national hero. Both are tickets to immortality. Now,I’m not saying we should all try dying young, but I am sure that true literary genius should not be limited by age, nor hindered by the appearance of gray hair,wrinkles and pot belly. As long as the fire and desire is inside you, go ahead and do it already. Think of us as bus passengers. Some will get off ahead of us, some after us. What matters is what are you going to do while you’re on the journey. Now if that bus happens to stop in front of Megamall, you’re stuck. Then the man with the peanuts,espasol and bottled water comes in. (Don’t ever buy that bottled water.)