What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/25/what-major-works-of-literature-were-written-after-age-of-85-75-65/

by paulpauper • 4 months ago

151 98 4 months ago

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

mellosouls4• 4 months ago

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_rider2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

I'll have you know my mediocrity is directly proportional to my age.

f1shy• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Serre is known for being active in old age as well

tgv2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

MyHonestOpinon• 4 months ago

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.

somenameforme3• 4 months ago

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.

Imustaskforhelp2• 4 months ago

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.

zulux2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

randomNumber73• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

abetusk2• 4 months ago

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/

mellosouls4• 4 months ago

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.

elcapitan• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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-...

mellosouls4• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Major=got popular enough? That doesn't need to be fully correlated to the quality of the work.

Kreutzer• 4 months ago

Right. And "written" isn't the best way to describe these, rather they are "published" after so-and-so.

chmod775• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

NetMageSCW3• 4 months ago

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?

latexr2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

"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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

candlemas• 4 months ago

John Milton was 63 when Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes were published.

marstall• 4 months ago

and he wrote them when he was completely blind!

IncreasePosts• 4 months ago

Well, his amanuenses and slave-daughters wrote them, he just spoke the words

FelipeCortez3• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Can you filter by "major works only"?

FelipeCortez3• 4 months ago

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" .

carefulfungi• 4 months ago

Wow - this is super cool. Thanks for sharing!

OfirMarom• 4 months ago

This is actually very awesome. Had no idea about this.

andai• 4 months ago

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 :)

FelipeCortez3• 4 months ago

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/...

CobrastanJorji2• 4 months ago

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 Charrière and the infamous Nazi, Albert Speer.

shrubble• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

(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• 4 months ago

This also suggests there aren't actually that many authors in this collection

There are 200 according to the website.

wodenokoto• 4 months ago

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.

dyauspitr3• 4 months ago

LLMs cite. So hope they did their due diligence.

ijk• 4 months ago

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.

Ajedi32• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

"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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Hasn't he publicly stated that he's given up on completing it?

No.

apparatur• 4 months ago

covfefe was at ~71

rjtavares• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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?

bethekidyouwant2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

It counts more! His novels are mind-blowing. Blood Meridian is unsurpassed IMO

bethekidyouwant2• 4 months ago

No counts less? he didn’t write the work when he was 72. If started it when he was 52…

keiferski• 4 months ago

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.

CobrastanJorji2• 4 months ago

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?

yCombLinks• 4 months ago

All of the authors age at a rate of 1 year per year

ikidd• 4 months ago

That doesn't bode well for GRR Martin getting the last book done.

seanhunter• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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

randomNumber73• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

NetMageSCW3• 4 months ago

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.

vismit2000• 4 months ago

Most of the literature by Srila Prabhupada used in most universities around the world was written well over the age of 75: https://prabhupadabooks.com/books

What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

Related Stories