4 ms·

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

151 points by paulpauper 7mo ago

mellosouls 7mo 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_rider 7mo 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 7mo ago
    I'll have you know my mediocrity is directly proportional to my age.
    - bee_rider 7mo ago
      Probably sigmoids
    - antisthenes 7mo ago
      I've reverted to the mean more times than I can count!
- f1shy 7mo 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 7mo ago
    Serre is known for being active in old age as well
- tgv 7mo 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 7mo 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.
    - tgv 7mo ago
      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 7mo 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.
- somenameforme 7mo 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.
  - Imustaskforhelp 7mo 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.
- allturtles 7mo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_History [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Jones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Jones
- TimPC 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
    - bsder 7mo ago
      > So much of what drives chart success is what is in fashion at the time. Trend setting will always be the domain of youngsters. I would suggest it's more the demands of poverty that make it a young person's game. So, so, so many pop musicians were "I was living in squalor for a decade plus was extremely depressed and was about to hang it up when <thing happened> and we got popular." Huey Lewis, Annie Lennox, ... I can go on and on. There was a metal artist that was being interviewed about when they were going to tour again and was "Yeah, we'll consider it. But I've got a lot of work at my tattoo business right now." There was another guy that was like "Yeah, had this fame hit in our 20s this would be nice but in our late 30s it isn't really useful. We figured out how to do life by now, and we're not going to disrupt that."
- abetusk 7mo 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/ https://priceonomics.com/at-what-age-does-genius-strike/
  - mellosouls 7mo 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.
    - abetusk 7mo ago
      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.
      - kcexn 7mo ago
        I don't think there is a bias in the field towards a youth narrative. I think there is a bias in the media. Nobody I've ever met would expect a breakthrough from a 20 something year old no matter how much of a genius they are. Communicating a breakthrough requires time, effort, and credibility to begin with, which nobody has at that age. Your 30's are when you can start to really do great things. And then depending on the field you can kind of just keep going as long as you have the energy for it. But lots of people begin to wear out into their 40's (for lots of different reasons). In terms of great breakthroughs. If you haven't had your great idea by 40. It's probably increasingly unlikely that you'll have one later in life (but not impossible). Not everyone needs to have a paradigm changing idea to have a successful career though.
- elcapitan 7mo 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 7mo 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-by-richard-hamming https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/you-and-your-research-...
  - mellosouls 7mo 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.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
gmuslera 7mo ago
Major=got popular enough? That doesn't need to be fully correlated to the quality of the work.
- Kreutzer 7mo ago
  Right. And "written" isn't the best way to describe these, rather they are "published" after so-and-so.
- ForRealsies 7mo ago
  [dead]
- chmod775 7mo 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 7mo 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.
- NetMageSCW 7mo 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?
latexr 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
    - latexr 7mo ago
      And not even verifying it before publishing.
candlemas 7mo ago
John Milton was 63 when Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes were published.
- marstall 7mo ago
  and he wrote them when he was completely blind!
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - IncreasePosts 7mo ago
    Well, his amanuenses and slave-daughters wrote them, he just spoke the words
    - suddenlybananas 7mo ago
      What are you referring to with his "slave daughters"?
FelipeCortez 7mo ago
This is actually a good fit for a Wikidata SPARQL query you can run here https://query.wikidata.org/ 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 7mo ago
  Can you filter by "major works only"?
  - FelipeCortez 7mo 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" .
    - throw4847285 7mo ago
      I don't think that's what they meant by major.
      - par1970 7mo ago
        Why?
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- carefulfungi 7mo ago
shrubble 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  > This also suggests there aren't actually that many authors in this collection There are 200 according to the website.
wodenokoto 7mo 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.
- dyauspitr 7mo ago
  LLMs cite. So hope they did their due diligence.
  - ijk 7mo 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.
    - dyauspitr 7mo ago
      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.
      - deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      - Retric 7mo ago
        What’s the point of getting the wrong answer quickly? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587662
        dyauspitr 7mo ago
        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.
thinkingemote 7mo 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/ https://www.edwardsaid.org/articles/thoughts-on-late-style/
arduanika 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
    > Hasn't he publicly stated that he's given up on completing it? No.
apparatur 7mo ago
covfefe was at ~71
- joeldg 7mo ago
  [dead]
rjtavares 7mo 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 7mo 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?
bethekidyouwant 7mo 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 7mo ago
  It counts more! His novels are mind-blowing. Blood Meridian is unsurpassed IMO
  - bethekidyouwant 7mo ago
    No counts less? he didn’t write the work when he was 72. If started it when he was 52…
joeldg 7mo ago
[dead]
keiferski 7mo 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.
CobrastanJorji 7mo 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 7mo ago
  All of the authors age at a rate of 1 year per year
ikidd 7mo ago
That doesn't bode well for GRR Martin getting the last book done.
seanhunter 7mo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Athill
lkm0 7mo 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
- randomNumber7 7mo 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 7mo 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.
NetMageSCW 7mo 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 7mo 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 https://prabhupadabooks.com/books

151 points by paulpauper 7mo 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_rider 7mo 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 7mo ago
  I'll have you know my mediocrity is directly proportional to my age.
  - bee_rider 7mo ago
    Probably sigmoids
  - antisthenes 7mo ago
    I've reverted to the mean more times than I can count!
f1shy 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Serre is known for being active in old age as well
tgv 7mo 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 7mo 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.
  - tgv 7mo ago
    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 7mo 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.
somenameforme 7mo 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.
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo 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.
allturtles 7mo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_History [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Jones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Jones
TimPC 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
  - bsder 7mo ago
    > So much of what drives chart success is what is in fashion at the time. Trend setting will always be the domain of youngsters. I would suggest it's more the demands of poverty that make it a young person's game. So, so, so many pop musicians were "I was living in squalor for a decade plus was extremely depressed and was about to hang it up when <thing happened> and we got popular." Huey Lewis, Annie Lennox, ... I can go on and on. There was a metal artist that was being interviewed about when they were going to tour again and was "Yeah, we'll consider it. But I've got a lot of work at my tattoo business right now." There was another guy that was like "Yeah, had this fame hit in our 20s this would be nice but in our late 30s it isn't really useful. We figured out how to do life by now, and we're not going to disrupt that."
abetusk 7mo 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/ https://priceonomics.com/at-what-age-does-genius-strike/
- mellosouls 7mo 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.
  - abetusk 7mo ago
    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.
    - kcexn 7mo ago
      I don't think there is a bias in the field towards a youth narrative. I think there is a bias in the media. Nobody I've ever met would expect a breakthrough from a 20 something year old no matter how much of a genius they are. Communicating a breakthrough requires time, effort, and credibility to begin with, which nobody has at that age. Your 30's are when you can start to really do great things. And then depending on the field you can kind of just keep going as long as you have the energy for it. But lots of people begin to wear out into their 40's (for lots of different reasons). In terms of great breakthroughs. If you haven't had your great idea by 40. It's probably increasingly unlikely that you'll have one later in life (but not impossible). Not everyone needs to have a paradigm changing idea to have a successful career though.
elcapitan 7mo 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 7mo 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-by-richard-hamming https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/you-and-your-research-...
- mellosouls 7mo 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.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

gmuslera 7mo ago

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

Kreutzer 7mo ago
Right. And "written" isn't the best way to describe these, rather they are "published" after so-and-so.
ForRealsies 7mo ago
[dead]
chmod775 7mo 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 7mo 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.

NetMageSCW 7mo 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?

latexr 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
  - latexr 7mo ago
    And not even verifying it before publishing.

candlemas 7mo ago

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

marstall 7mo ago
and he wrote them when he was completely blind!
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- IncreasePosts 7mo ago
  Well, his amanuenses and slave-daughters wrote them, he just spoke the words
  - suddenlybananas 7mo ago
    What are you referring to with his "slave daughters"?

FelipeCortez 7mo ago

This is actually a good fit for a Wikidata SPARQL query you can run here https://query.wikidata.org/ 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 7mo ago
Can you filter by "major works only"?
- FelipeCortez 7mo 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" .
  - throw4847285 7mo ago
    I don't think that's what they meant by major.
    - par1970 7mo ago
      Why?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
carefulfungi 7mo ago

shrubble 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
> This also suggests there aren't actually that many authors in this collection There are 200 according to the website.

wodenokoto 7mo 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.

dyauspitr 7mo ago
LLMs cite. So hope they did their due diligence.
- ijk 7mo 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.
  - dyauspitr 7mo ago
    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.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - Retric 7mo ago
      What’s the point of getting the wrong answer quickly? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587662
      - dyauspitr 7mo ago
        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.

thinkingemote 7mo 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/ https://www.edwardsaid.org/articles/thoughts-on-late-style/

arduanika 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  > Hasn't he publicly stated that he's given up on completing it? No.

apparatur 7mo ago

covfefe was at ~71

joeldg 7mo ago
[dead]

rjtavares 7mo 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 7mo 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?

bethekidyouwant 7mo 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 7mo ago
It counts more! His novels are mind-blowing. Blood Meridian is unsurpassed IMO
- bethekidyouwant 7mo ago
  No counts less? he didn’t write the work when he was 72. If started it when he was 52…

joeldg 7mo ago

[dead]

keiferski 7mo 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.

CobrastanJorji 7mo 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 7mo ago
All of the authors age at a rate of 1 year per year

ikidd 7mo ago

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

seanhunter 7mo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Athill

lkm0 7mo 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

randomNumber7 7mo 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 7mo 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.

NetMageSCW 7mo 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 7mo 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 https://prabhupadabooks.com/books