[HN Gopher] What major works of literature were written after ag...
___________________________________________________________________
What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75?
65?
Author : paulpauper
Score : 121 points
Date : 2026-03-28 16:29 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
| mellosouls wrote:
| I think this is pretty common across different creative forms
| albeit with different age ranges but constrained at the higher
| end.
|
| So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done by
| people in their 20s.
|
| Literature (esp novels) seems to occupy an older range, perhaps
| 30s to 50s. Perhaps classical music and philosophy also? I don't
| know about the visual arts.
|
| I interpret it as the former requiring the creative fireworks of
| youthful neural elasticity and the latter the depth we associate
| with lived experience and wisdom.
|
| Naturally there are outliers (general relativity in Einstein's
| early 30s, Shakespeare word play till his late 40s) but I think
| in general these rules of thumb seem to be a good guide for the
| _very highest_ achievers and for the most creative periods for us
| mere mortals.
|
| Mediocrity of course is unconstrained by age.
| bee_rider wrote:
| On the bright side, most of us were never candidates for
| inventing relativity, really. I wonder if our mediocrity
| remains stable, of if we lose a proportional amount of
| capability as the luminaries did.
| sunrunner wrote:
| I'll have you know my mediocrity is directly proportional to
| my age.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Probably sigmoids
| antisthenes wrote:
| I've reverted to the mean more times than I can count!
| f1shy wrote:
| > So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done
| by people in their 20s.
|
| I can, just from feeling, agree to the pop music. About math I
| would cite the example of Gilbert Strang, who made many books
| at advanced age, including one at age 86 or other publications
| well over the 70s. Another example (well not math, but CS)
| Donald Knuth. I do not know how is the whole statistic, but
| writing good books, even text books, does not seem to be
| teenager thing.
| HappyPanacea wrote:
| Serre is known for being active in old age as well
| tgv wrote:
| The best works of Bach and Beethoven are from later in their
| life, although neither lived to be 85 (65 and 57,
| respectively), and also wrote great works in their younger
| years. Bruckner kept improving with age. There are also
| composers who lost it at a later age: Ravel, famously.
| Classical music is difficult, so experience does allow a better
| overall view, something which a lot of short works (such as pop
| songs) don't need.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Ravel wrote his most famous work, Bolero, after age 50, and
| suffered a traumatic head injury a few years later. Not a
| good example, except perhaps that the odds of bad things
| happening increase with longevity.
| tgv wrote:
| He wasn't happy with the Bolero, and it certainly wasn't
| his best work. The piano concerto in G was also late, and
| that's definitely better. I didn't know about the head
| trauma.
| MyHonestOpinon wrote:
| If I remember correctly. Bach had about 20 children and he
| dedicated a lot of his time to their education. A few became
| very successful musicians. It is an example than later in
| life a lot of our value is not so much on doing, but helping
| form the new generations.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I think a lot is driven by environmental rather than genetic
| factors. For instance the article mentions that both The Road,
| and No Country for Old Men were written when Cormack was in his
| 70s. But very few people in their 70s are even trying to write,
| let alone get published.
|
| I think there's something similar in chess where players tend
| to peak around their mid to late 30s. But a major issue there
| is that that's also the age that most players are having
| children and developing ever more interests. And they're
| competing against the younger generation which is still
| dedicating 100% of their life, and time, to chess. Absent some
| monumental edge, that's a battle you're going to inevitably
| lose - even if aging factors did not exist.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 100% true about chess but I think there's more nuance to it.
|
| In 6th grade, I had gone to a chess coach who were a friend
| of my father (technically my father knew his father very
| well). It was my birthday/a day close to it IIRC and I wanted
| to learn chess. He was an international-master (or close to
| it) /National-master (I think he just had one norm less) and
| he told me about his story and everything, but he said that
| in a way, he does feel like if he had put the efforts within
| something like finance for example, he really could earn more
| than 10 times the money but he said that he really loved
| chess with a passion. I think that is another element and I
| think he was within his 30's. Not everyone makes it even that
| big within chess aside from a very few at the top
|
| You are sort of right in the manner that, as teens grow and
| the focus of life/dedication from teenage years on solely
| getting good at chess, diversifies into for example
| relationships/money-aspects, the mind simply doesn't have
| enough competition to play chess Comparing this to a 18 year
| old or 17 year old who just wants to get best at chess and
| doesn't really want anything else other than chess with their
| complete and utter dedication.
|
| (There is also another theory recently within Chess of the
| pressures of being the world champion, from Ding Liren to
| Gukesh, both have faced tremendous losses after being the
| best, Gukesh has even lost 75 points after being the world
| champion, which I believe also has to be because of how many
| eyes/the pressure building up)
|
| I still like playing chess but all of this makes me also
| appreciate all the chess players as well in a bit-more behind
| the scenes manner too. At professional level, calling it
| taxing sport mentally might even be a bit of an
| understatement especially for the people within their 30's.
|
| another thing I personally like about Ding and Gukesh both is
| that they are both humble. They might win or lose but with
| the brief time that they both had/will have the crown is with
| their own humbleness. I really like them both a lot. Hope
| history remembers both their struggles and their humbleness.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Magnus Carlsen is still absolutely destroying anyone else
| in his 30s. By far.
|
| He didn't compete for the world champion becaue he didn't
| want to put in the effort for the preparation (again). Also
| it would have been boring if he played it because he would
| have won again.
|
| He intentionally starts with subobtimal openings at major
| turnaments because of boredom and still wins.
| zulux wrote:
| Sort of confirm: I'm older, and my mind is fine, I just don't
| _care_ as much anymore. I 'm comfortably numb as the song
| goes.
| Morromist wrote:
| Yeah. there is some obvious logic that one can use here
| without having to look at data.
|
| Not everyone survives to write to an old age.
|
| Old people have health problems that can prevent them from
| work, like going blind.
|
| People who write a great work at an old age will not have the
| time and energy to do all the non-writing parts of making the
| great work seen by readers - which has always been a big part
| of writing. Like getting their book in bookstores,
| advertising it, etc.
|
| If someone is a very talented writer they are likely to write
| great stuff before they get old and may spend their old age
| preening and working on their legacy instead of new works.
| They will already know they're a great writer, so the drive
| to make another great work is lessened.
|
| If someone is already an accomplished writer more of their
| time will be taken up with invitations to speak, being on
| award panels, doing interviews, writing introductions.
|
| There is less financial incentive to write a great work when
| you're very old.
|
| It is harder to be part of a literary salon full of smart
| people that help you grow your creativity when you're very
| old.
|
| As people grow older they become more alienated from the
| zeitgeist and are better at connecting with their own
| generation.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| It's very clear from looking at chess, but also e.g. online
| gaming and sports that people in their 20s have the strongest
| cognitive capabilities, especially "processing speed".
|
| But on the other hand, the world is very complicated and you
| can't know much in your 20s. I'm today a much better
| programmer than 10 years ago, even with slightly less brains.
| You are not going to write an impactfull novel without live
| experience.
|
| How that declines varies and some people still have most
| cognitive capabilities in their 70s.
| allturtles wrote:
| Yeah there are quite a few exceptions to this. I've been
| (re-)reading _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ , and two of the
| four people directly involved in the discovery and explanation
| of nuclear fission were 60 (Hahn and Meitner) the other two
| (Frisch and Strassman) were in their mid-to-late 30s. Shortly
| after, Bohr (53) figured out that the oddities of uranium's
| fission behavior were due to the different activation energies
| of U-235 and U-238.
|
| I think the best place to look for major works late in life is
| probably historical writing, which calls for accumulated
| knowledge and wisdom. Looking at the four most recent winners
| of the Pulitzer Prize in history from 2023-2025 [0], all appear
| to be north of 50 based on their Wikipedia pages (which give
| dates of education if not dates of birth), and one is in her
| 70s [1].
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_History
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Jones
| TimPC wrote:
| I think pop musicians are capable of doing greater works later,
| but the perception of pop works are so heavily influenced by
| the image/presentation of the artist that we view the works as
| lesser. I don't think there is something fundamentally
| different about pop music that leads to best works being
| earlier relative to other genres of music beyond that.
| quesera wrote:
| A great deal of pop music, performed by teens-20yos, is
| written and produced by seasoned professionals who are in
| their 30s-40s-50s.
|
| The exceptions to that pattern are remarkable.
| musictubes wrote:
| If we limit the definition of pop music to what charts I
| think it makes all the sense in the world that it is a young
| person's game. So much of what drives chart success is what
| is in fashion at the time. Trend setting will always be the
| domain of youngsters.
|
| If we expand the definition of pop music to all music that
| isn't classical/jazz/experimental, etc. then older, more
| experienced musicians should be able to do quite well. Frank
| Sinatra honed his craft over the decades. I think the stuff
| he did in his 40s and 50s is probably his best.
| abetusk wrote:
| I think this is a gross cultural misconception. Most scientists
| do their best work in their 30s and 40s. See [0].
|
| My take on this is that it takes about a decade before
| experience, knowledge and wisdom can be used to see a bigger
| picture to make a breakthrough.
|
| [0] https://priceonomics.com/at-what-age-does-genius-strike/
| mellosouls wrote:
| A useful link but note:
|
| a) the curve indicates 30s not 40s
|
| b) there is no breakdown into theoretical vs experimental
| research, or scientific field; theory I would expect to be
| over-represented at the younger end especially as the science
| discipline becomes "harder".
|
| Overall I would say it lends credence to the idea physics is
| a young person's game at the very highest levels.
| abetusk wrote:
| a) the inflection point is in the high 30s. Further
| $\int_{40}^{50} f(x) dx > \int_{20}^{30} f(x) dx$.
|
| b) true there is no breakdown but I would expect the exact
| opposite as fields get harder. More context requires more
| training and familiarity, which I would expect to increase
| age.
|
| My point is that I think there's a bias in the field
| towards the youth narrative but the majority of discovery,
| even in physics, happens at a later age.
| elcapitan wrote:
| > I interpret it as the former requiring the creative fireworks
| of youthful neural elasticity and the latter the depth we
| associate with lived experience and wisdom.
|
| That being said, I think an interesting factor would also be
| which of those who wrote major works in their later age already
| did a decent amount of writing in their earlier years. Even if
| you have life experience, I would imagine that you will have to
| build up the "muscle memory" of writing skills in your more
| elastic years (e.g. by becoming a successful writer after a
| lifetime of journalistic work or just minor literary works).
| sp527 wrote:
| > So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done
| by people in their 20s.
|
| I think there's a chance this is itself a type of selection
| bias, because you're over-indexing on the famous. And fame has
| consequences.
|
| Many music artists end up trapped by their own fame (and
| attendant expectations) and fail to update themselves over
| time, thus falling out of the limelight. But there are plenty
| who defy this trend. Tiesto, David Guetta, Kaskade, and Armin
| van Buuren in EDM, for example. Coldplay is another great
| example. Love them or hate them, they're still putting out
| chart toppers.
|
| Something similar is true for scientists in my opinion. I think
| Richard Hamming had the most incisive analysis of this in 'You
| and Your Research' [1], which is worth reading in its entirety.
|
| > But let me say why age seems to have the effect it does. In
| the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself
| on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work. You
| may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize.
| The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold
| Auditorium; all three winners got up and made speeches. The
| third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said,
| "I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let
| it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain."
| Well I said to myself, "That is nice." But in a few weeks I saw
| it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.
|
| > When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems.
| This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do
| you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this
| error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from
| which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing
| right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another
| reason why you find that when you get early recognition it
| seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite
| quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in
| Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than
| any institution has created, judged by what they did before
| they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they
| weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got
| there and were only good afterwards.
|
| My view is that fatalistically assuming that age is an obstacle
| to creative output obscures the hidden variables that are
| genuinely determinative.
|
| [1] https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/you-and-your-
| research-...
| mellosouls wrote:
| _I think there 's a chance this is itself a type of selection
| bias, because you're over-indexing on the famous_
|
| Not in this case, no, at least as far as the music goes.
|
| My user-name here is taken from a Northern Soul record as its
| the music that means the most to me. The genre is obscure
| almost by definition.
|
| I would guesstimate the proportion of the hundreds
| (thousands?) of records so classified and celebrated made by
| people under 30 to be over 95% and that correlates with my
| (admittedly subjective) experience of the best music of other
| pop genres.
| gmuslera wrote:
| Major=got popular enough? That doesn't need to be fully
| correlated to the quality of the work.
| Kreutzer wrote:
| Right. And "written" isn't the best way to describe these,
| rather they are "published" after so-and-so.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Popularity is _an_ indicator of _a_ quality (appeal). If the
| author intends to write something with wide appeal and
| succeeds, they 're probably good at their job. Now something
| can be popular and read by many people without necessarily
| appealing to them, but that's another story.
|
| What is important to keep in mind is that works of literature
| have more than one quality, and even "great" works exceed at
| often just a few, while being mediocre on other axis. Many are
| considered great merely for being first or having an outsized
| influence on works that came after, even though later works
| improved on it and did the same thing better!
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| This is a disappointing statistical modelling technique.
|
| The author asked LLMs to produce lists of data which are readily
| available on the likes of wikipedia. Author date of birth, list
| of publications, and publication release date are all fairly easy
| to get hold of. They just need formatted appropriately. The LLMs
| produced a few false positives, and missed out some prominent
| works.
|
| I get that this is just the author working in public & writing
| about what they're up to, but the number of avoidable errors
| introduced by the methodology make reading it a poor use of time.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Fairly easily feels like it is doing some heavy lifting here.
| How much code would it take to produce a list of authors of
| major works (whatever that means), and their age when the work
| was published?
| latexr wrote:
| > In trying to come up with some good examples I asked LLMs.
| (...)
|
| > So I tried to cast the net more broadly and asked LLMs (...)
|
| > EDIT: also hunted down several mistakes, as one would expect
| from LLMs; thanks to commenters.
|
| This is a slop post. You can't trust any of the data. It's
| baffling and worrying the author apparently understands mistakes
| from LLMs are to be expected but still decided to publish without
| doing due diligence.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| "Source: I made it up" was a meme meant to be deployed in
| conversations between children online. And now we're seeing the
| phrase deployed sincerely and almost verbatim in the annals of
| the most prestigious institutions of thought.
|
| Things seem a bit more dire now.
| salviati wrote:
| You're pushing back against openly using LLMs to assist in
| research for writing articles.
|
| In my opinion the effect of your pushback is nudging people to
| not disclose their use of LLMs. I'm not sure that's what you
| want.
|
| In other words, if every time someone says "I used an LLM to
| assist me with this article" they get backslash, these people
| will not stop using LLMs. They'll stop telling that they did.
| asimpletune wrote:
| I don't think the problem is that they used an LLM to write
| the article. It seems that the commenter takes issue with
| them using the LLM to get the data to analyze.
| latexr wrote:
| _And_ not even verifying it before publishing.
| candlemas wrote:
| John Milton was 63 when Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes
| were published.
| marstall wrote:
| and he wrote them when he was completely blind!
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Well, his amanuenses and slave-daughters wrote them, he just
| spoke the words
| FelipeCortez wrote:
| This is actually a good fit for a Wikidata SPARQL query you can
| run here https://query.wikidata.org/: SELECT
| ?work ?workLabel ?author ?authorLabel ?publicationDate
| ?ageAtPublication WHERE { ?author wdt:P569 ?birth .
| ?author wdt:P570 ?death . ?author wdt:P800 ?work .
| ?work wdt:P50 ?author ; wdt:P31 wd:Q47461344 ;
| wdt:P577 ?publicationDate .
| FILTER(?publicationDate <= ?death)
| BIND(YEAR(?publicationDate) - YEAR(?birth) AS ?ageAtPublication)
| FILTER(?ageAtPublication > 60) SERVICE
| wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
| } ORDER BY DESC(?ageAtPublication) LIMIT 300
| tantalor wrote:
| Can you filter by "major works only"?
| FelipeCortez wrote:
| that's kind of what P800 (notable work) is doing, but you can
| try some approximations to "major work" with "has both an
| English Wikipedia page and a Goodreads link":
| ?work wdt:P50 ?author ; wdt:P577 ?publicationDate
| ; wdt:P8383 ?goodreadsID . ?article
| schema:about ?work ; schema:isPartOf
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/> ;
| schema:inLanguage "en" .
| throw4847285 wrote:
| I don't think that's what they meant by major.
| par1970 wrote:
| Why?
| carefulfungi wrote:
| Wow - this is super cool. Thanks for sharing!
| OfirMarom wrote:
| This is actually very awesome. Had no idea about this.
| andai wrote:
| How can I learn more about this? I looked into it recently but
| didn't get very far.
|
| This seems like the kind of thing that should be more widely
| known, and have some good tutorials written for it :)
| FelipeCortez wrote:
| The Wikidata documentation is good:
|
| https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction
|
| And you can find lots of SPARQL examples here:
|
| https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/.
| ..
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| This is a very cool query tool that I haven't seen before,
| thanks! (Also the syntax drives me a little batty).
|
| I tried modifying it to give me authors whose first publication
| (any publication at all) happened after 60 years old, but also
| who had at least one wdt:P800 work. I got people like Cato the
| Elder, Josephus, and William of Tyre.
|
| I tried again for only people born in the 20th century, and I
| got some results (plus quite a bit of wrong answers, presumably
| something about the query or data)! Oddly quite a few of the
| results are from criminals who wrote an autobiography after
| their release, including Henri Charriere and the infamous Nazi,
| Albert Speer.
| shrubble wrote:
| Douglas Southall Freeman wrote the definitive biography of Robert
| E Lee over twenty years, publishing it when he was 49; he then
| went on to publish his seven volume biography on George
| Washington when he was 62 (he finished the sixth volume on the
| day he died; the seventh was completed by his research
| assistants).
| ralferoo wrote:
| (complete sidetrack)
|
| I think this graph is a great illustration about how anonymising
| data is hard. It's very easy to isolate individual authors from
| this list, because there are clear diagonal lines because the
| year and age are increasing in lockstep. This also suggests there
| aren't actually that many authors in this collection, because of
| these strong diagonals everywhere.
|
| There's probably also some erroneous data here with a bunch of
| points representing material written by people at age 34 between
| about 1920 and 1940 (an obvious horizontal line) when most of the
| rest of the graph doesn't show any strong horizontal bias for a
| specific age.
| Gander5739 wrote:
| > This also suggests there aren't actually that many authors in
| this collection
|
| There are 200 according to the website.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| > asked LLMs to compile list of 10-20 writers considered canon in
| each decade since 1800, then identify all their notable works and
| years of publication. After some iterations with coding agents I
| got over 2,000 works by 200 authors.
|
| Wait, so the source data is just LLM hallucinations? It makes
| sense to use an LLM to build the data collection, but not to
| build your source data.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| LLMs cite. So hope they did their due diligence.
| ijk wrote:
| It feels a lot like storing your data as an essay in a Word
| doc instead of a spreadsheet. It can work and all of the math
| is _probably_ correct, but it 's very much the wrong tool
| when the structured data was right there to be used instead.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| The structure data is scattered all over the place. This
| does the very important thing of aggregating them, and
| bringing them together. If you had to manually do that it
| could take weeks.
| Retric wrote:
| What's the point of getting the wrong answer quickly?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587662
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Well, we're just going in circles now. I just said LLMs
| cite what they find so it's not going to be the wrong
| answer if you do your due diligence.
| uoaei wrote:
| Do extra work in step 2 because you got lazy in step 1 is
| not my idea of efficient or complete.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| that depends how much more quickly and efficiently you
| can do the extra work in step 2 than in step 1.
| Retric wrote:
| In this case it's strictly less efficient.
|
| You can only correct for missing entries by doing the
| same work you'd need to start from scratch. But after
| that you now have a second list to consider.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| It's a long way from got lazy to didn't write their own
| Internet scraper to scan for books, author's age and
| opinions.
| Retric wrote:
| Missing entries don't get corrected by looking at the LLM
| output. That only helps when the LLM makes something up
| from thin air or mangles the output.
|
| Of course it's not the kind of question you can get an
| objectively correct answer for, but you could come up
| with the correct answer for a given methodology.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| What do you mean by due diligence here? Manually checking
| 2000 citations sounds a lot harder to me than just pulling
| the data from a reliable source to start with.
| cowboylowrez wrote:
| This is in my opinion a better use of tech that has an error
| rate (hallucination), you just assume that its a fuzzy search,
| and sample the results to see how you did. I'd like to see a
| few from the results for sure!
| thinkingemote wrote:
| "The accepted notion is that age confers a spirit of
| reconciliation and serenity on late works, often expressed in
| terms of a miraculous transfiguration of reality....But what of
| artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as
| intransigence, difficulty, and contradiction? What if age and ill
| health don't produce serenity at all? "
|
| Thoughts on Late Style by Edward Said
| https://www.edwardsaid.org/articles/thoughts-on-late-style/
| arduanika wrote:
| George R. R. Martin completed his cycle "A Song of Ice and Fire"
| when he was...wait...I'll get back to you on this one.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Hasn't he publicly stated that he's given up on completing it?
| TBH if that is the case, I kind of respect him more for that.
| justin66 wrote:
| > Hasn't he publicly stated that he's given up on completing
| it?
|
| No.
| apparatur wrote:
| covfefe was at ~71
| rjtavares wrote:
| Opened it just to check if Saramago was there, and indeed, he is.
|
| For most of his professional life he was a journalist. He
| published his second novel at 55, only found his narrative style
| at almost 60, then wrote 15 novels (and won a Nobel) after that.
| What an amazing career.
| OJFord wrote:
| > Also interestingly, the trend in that graph keeps going up in
| recent years... but it looks to me like this is driven by lack of
| major works from young authors. It may be how my sample is
| constructed.
|
| Isn't that because older authors have had more time to gain
| notoriety, their earlier works to be deemed 'major' in
| retrospect?
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| I feel like Cormac McCarthy famously took 20 years to write his
| novels so does it really count if you finished it when you were
| 72?
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| It counts more! His novels are mind-blowing. Blood Meridian is
| unsurpassed IMO
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| No counts less? he didn't write the work when he was 72. If
| started it when he was 52...
| keiferski wrote:
| It's difficult to be a truly interesting person with a unique
| perspective on life, _and_ have the skills to transmute that
| experience into a work of art, when you're young. You simply
| haven't logged the hours in the world, and I kind of don't trust
| your opinion on something if you haven't.
|
| Not sure if I'd call him a major writer, but Raymond Chandler is
| one of my favorites and I think he's a good example. To me there
| is a fundamental difference between his crime stories, which show
| the results of corporate life, alcoholism, personal tragedy, war,
| etc. and a more modern crime writer that's just writing a genre
| piece with all the right pieces, but no actual personal
| experience.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| There are a suspicously large number of very straight diagonal
| lines on those graphs with identical slopes. I might predict that
| they are individual famous authors that released a lot of works,
| but the slopes are all identical. What's going on there?
| ikidd wrote:
| That doesn't bode well for GRR Martin getting the last book done.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Well the canonical example is Diana Athill who had a long and
| distinguished career at a literary editor for people Phillip
| Roth, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Jack Kerouac and others, then
| retired at the age of 75 and started writing her own novels and
| memoirs and is considered one of the greatest writers in English
| of the 20th century. "After a funeral" is I think the one of hers
| I read and it's amazing
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Athill
| lkm0 wrote:
| Beyond the data science interest, isn't this sort of charting
| powered by the "my time's running out and I still haven't left my
| mark in history" intrusive thought? Purely from a fitting
| perspective I'd wager the correlation is close to zero, because
| "major works" will be different in a century, and again changed
| in two. Shakespeare was not very popular in the 17th per
| wikipedia. As George Orwell put it, it's much easier to write
| when you do it for a purpose that matters to you. Hugo wrote
| Notre-Dame mostly to rant about architecture; creating a major
| work for the purpose of staving off fears of being forgotten I
| feel is not enough in itself
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| It could be the feeling that you are more capable compared to
| others and actually missed something if you don't find an
| appropriate use for it.
| boznz wrote:
| For me my 60's was the best time to start writing fiction, before
| then I always had excuses why I would not write, now with much
| more free time, experience and no money worries, I can think back
| on all those thousands of novels I read, knowing I could write a
| better one. Writing is also one of the cheapest retirement
| hobbies you can have and you are also more likely to experiment
| across different genres as you are not pandering to an audience.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| It feels like a natural result of life expectancy increasing over
| 70 (world wide average) only in 2021 and a number of years past
| publication being required for something to be deemed a major
| work means it is natural that there are few today. Something like
| 100%, 110%, and 120% if life expectancy at the author's time of
| birth might be a more useful measure today.
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