Finely Aged Novelists
With every passing year, I get more interested in creative people who have done their most significant work late in life. I like late bloomers . They give me hope for humanity in some ways, because their stories are stories where the climax doesn't come in the first chapter. Thus, I was interested in Rick Gekoski's post at The Guardian titled, "When novelists reach the end of their stories", which I hoped would explode the myth that novels are best left to the young. Alas, it is youth-worshipping claptrap, built on a vastly incomplete set of examples used to prove an imaginary rule. Luckily, though, the Guardian readers are not buying into the premise, and the comments section is full of great examples that disprove Gekoski's supposed rule, that question his basic premise, and that highlight the narrowness of his example set. Commenters have listed writers who have done great work throughout their careers, writers who have had long apprentice periods before...
