As writers get older and improve at their skill, they sometimes bemoan the lost years of youth—time when they had more energy and yet were not writing. There are excuses that we give ourselves. Getting an education, working to pay for rent and groceries, time spent raising children all subtract from the time required to produce quality novels. Literary masterpieces don’t come from adolescents, but they are not as frequently produced by elderly people either.

Susan Eloise Hinton (better known as S.E. Hinton) of Tulsa, Oklahoma, began writing her first novel, The Outsiders, in 1965 at the age of 17. She had it published in 1967 and is one of the youngest writers to gain fame for her works. She continued to write young adult novels and children’s books, but time in between books increased to decades. Frank McCourt, of New York City, did not publish his first novel until he was 66. His autobiography, Angela’s Ashes, won the Pulitzers Prize. Then, he wrote two more memoirs and a few shorter pieces before he died in 2009. 

So writers can start at any age, right? However, these two authors are outliers. H. C. Lehman who studied creativity and age found creative achievement in the arts was a bell curve with a single-peak as a function of age. Most writers produced their greatest work by age 45, but poets tended to peak as early as their thirties._[2] 

A cursory study of literature reveals a number of poets—Robert Burns, Percy Shelly, Alexander Pushkin, George Gordon (also known as Lord Byron) and Edgar Allan Poe—didn’t make it into their forties. There are exceptions to this trend. Robert Frost wrote his most well-known works in his late forties and fifties. However, poets with a longer life often stopped producing as much work.

D. K. Simonton also studied the lives of creative geniuses and concluded that poets tend to peak the earliest of the artistic disciplines. Yet, no matter at what age each poet started to produce renown work, their creative production rose fairly rapidly and then declined until their death. The good news? His research showed that novelists seem to peak later and decline more slowly. This may result from the complexity of novels and a greater ambiguity in this field of writing._[2]

Just as there is no single factor contributing to the creativity of individuals, there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to age and creativity. There are just trends that may not always hold true, because as all creative people know, rules are meant to be broken.

Photo of San Angelo, TX by K.N. Listman 

_{[1] Lehman, H. C. (1962). More about age and achievement. Gerontologist, 2, 141-148.}

_{[2] Lehrer, J. ” Old Writers,” The Frontal Cortex, Posted on June 15, 2010}