by Writing Workshops Staff
A year ago
There's a persistent myth in the literary world that successful writers are prodigies who publish their first novels in their twenties, collect accolades before thirty, and spend the rest of their lives accepting lifetime achievement awards. The reality is far more encouraging for those of us who came to writing later, or who've been writing for years without yet finding our audience.
Many of the most celebrated authors in literary history didn't publish their first books until well into middle age or beyond. They worked other careers, raised families, accumulated the life experience that would eventually fuel their masterpieces, and then sat down to write with a depth and wisdom that only time can provide.
If you've ever worried that you've missed your window, that you're too old to start, or that your best years for creativity are behind you, these ten authors offer powerful evidence to the contrary.
Toni Morrison (First Novel at 39)
Before Toni Morrison became one of the most important American novelists of the twentieth century, she spent nearly two decades working in publishing as an editor at Random House, where she championed the work of Black writers including Angela Davis and Gayl Jones. She was also raising two sons as a single mother in Syracuse, New York, waking before dawn to write before the demands of the day took over.
Her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970 when Morrison was thirty-nine years old. The book received modest attention at first, but Morrison kept writing. Song of Solomon came seven years later and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Beloved earned her the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993, she became the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Morrison once said that she wrote the books she wanted to read but couldn't find. Her late start gave her the editorial acumen to know exactly what those books needed to be.
Mark Twain (First Major Novel at 41)
Samuel Clemens worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, a silver miner in Nevada, and a newspaper reporter in San Francisco before he became Mark Twain. He published humorous sketches and travel writing throughout his thirties, but it wasn't until 1876 that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer appeared, when Twain was forty-one.
The novel that would cement his legacy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, wasn't published until 1884, when Twain was nearly fifty. That book, often called the Great American Novel, drew directly on the river knowledge and regional expertise Twain had accumulated in his earlier careers. His years as a pilot gave him the Mississippi; his years as a journalist gave him the ear for dialect and the satirist's eye for human folly.
Marcel Proust (First Volume at 42)
Marcel Proust spent his twenties and thirties as a Parisian socialite, attending salons, cultivating friendships with aristocrats, and making only modest attempts at literary work. His health was fragile, and he was financially supported by his family, which led many to dismiss him as a dilettante.
When he finally began writing In Search of Lost Time in earnest, he was in his late thirties. The first volume, Swann's Way, was rejected by several publishers and eventually self-published in 1913, when Proust was forty-two. He spent the remaining nine years of his life completing the seven-volume masterwork, often writing through the night in his cork-lined bedroom.
The novel's central insight—that memory, triggered by sensation, can recover entire worlds we thought lost—could only have been written by someone with enough past to remember and enough distance to understand what that past meant.
Henry Miller (First Published Novel at 44)
Henry Miller spent his twenties working for Western Union and his thirties trying and failing to write novels that publishers would accept. He moved to Paris in 1930, nearly broke, and immersed himself in the expatriate literary scene.
Tropic of Cancer was published in Paris in 1934, when Miller was forty-four. The book was immediately banned in the United States and wouldn't be legally available there for nearly thirty years. Miller didn't care. He had finally found his voice: raw, exuberant, uncompromising. The decades of failure had taught him what he didn't want to write, and the freedom of having nothing left to lose taught him how to write what he did.
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit at 45)
J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, a scholar of medieval literature, and a devoted father of four when he began scribbling a sentence on a blank page while grading student exams: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." He didn't know what a hobbit was, but he spent the next several years finding out.
The Hobbit was published in 1937, when Tolkien was forty-five. Its success led his publisher to request a sequel, which took Tolkien twelve years to complete. The Lord of the Rings appeared when he was sixty-two, and it would become one of the best-selling novels ever written.
Tolkien's scholarly expertise in languages, mythology, and medieval literature—accumulated over decades of academic work—gave Middle-earth its extraordinary depth. He wasn't making things up; he was drawing on a lifetime of study.
Raymond Chandler (First Novel at 51)
Raymond Chandler was fired from his job as an oil company executive in 1932, during the Depression, at the age of forty-four. Unemployed and unsure what to do next, he began reading pulp detective magazines and decided he could write stories as good as the ones he was reading.
He spent years learning the craft, studying stories with scientific precision, typing out the work of writers he admired to understand their rhythms. His first short story was published when he was forty-five. His first novel, The Big Sleep, introducing the iconic detective Philip Marlowe, appeared in 1939. Chandler was fifty-one years old.
Chandler brought to crime fiction a literary sensibility it had never seen before. His sentences were poetry. His similes were unforgettable. And his years in the business world gave Marlowe his weary understanding of how money and power corrupt.
Richard Adams (Watership Down at 52)
Richard Adams worked as a civil servant in the British government for twenty-five years, spending his days on agricultural policy and environmental regulations. In the evenings, he told stories to his two daughters during long car trips—stories about a band of rabbits seeking a new home.
When his daughters insisted he write the stories down, Adams spent two years crafting what would become Watership Down. The manuscript was rejected by thirteen publishers before Rex Collings, a small one-man press, agreed to publish it in 1972. Adams was fifty-two years old.
The novel won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Prize, sold millions of copies worldwide, and has never been out of print. Adams's decades of experience in government gave the rabbits' society its political complexity, and his lifelong love of the English countryside gave the novel its extraordinary sense of place.
Annie Proulx (First Novel at 57)
Annie Proulx spent her thirties and forties working as a freelance journalist, writing articles about weather, gardening, and rural life for small magazines. She raised three sons, mostly on her own, in rural Vermont. She was past fifty before she attempted fiction seriously.
Her first novel, Postcards, was published in 1992 when Proulx was fifty-seven. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her second novel, The Shipping News, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" became one of the most acclaimed and influential works of American fiction of its era.
Proulx's decades of nonfiction work taught her to observe carefully and write economically. Her years in rural New England and, later, Wyoming gave her the deep knowledge of landscape and working-class life that distinguishes her fiction.
"You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page."
— Annie Proulx
Laura Ingalls Wilder (First Novel at 65)
Laura Ingalls Wilder lived the stories that would make her famous: the covered wagon journeys across the American frontier, the one-room schoolhouses, the brutal winters, the simple pleasures of family life on the prairie. But she didn't begin writing about them until she was in her sixties.
Wilder had worked as a farm wife, a seamstress, and a columnist for a Missouri farm journal. In 1930, at the urging of her daughter Rose, she began transforming her childhood memories into narrative. Little House in the Big Woods was published in 1932, when Wilder was sixty-five years old.
Over the next eleven years, she published eight more books in the Little House series. The books have sold over sixty million copies and remain beloved by readers around the world. Wilder's long life gave her both the material and the perspective to shape frontier hardship into enduring art.
Frank McCourt (First Book at 66)
Frank McCourt immigrated from Ireland to New York at nineteen and spent the next thirty years teaching English in New York City public high schools. He had always wanted to write about his impoverished childhood in Limerick, but the classroom consumed his energy, and the memories were painful to revisit.
After retiring from teaching, McCourt finally sat down to write. Angela's Ashes, his memoir of growing up poor in Ireland, was published in 1996 when McCourt was sixty-six years old. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and spent over two years on the bestseller list.
McCourt's thirty years in the classroom had given him a storyteller's instincts—he knew how to hold an audience—and his decades of distance from the material allowed him to write about trauma with humor and grace rather than bitterness.
What These Authors Teach Us
The writers on this list didn't succeed despite their late starts. They succeeded, in many ways, because of them. Their other careers gave them material, expertise, and perspective. Their years of reading gave them a deep understanding of what good writing looks like. Their accumulated rejections and failures taught them what didn't work. And their age gave them the patience and discipline to see long projects through to completion.
If you're writing in your forties, fifties, sixties, or beyond, you're in extraordinary company. The only writers who never publish are the ones who stop writing. The ones who keep going—who keep learning, keep revising, keep submitting—eventually find their readers.
The question isn't whether you're too old to start. The question is what you're going to write next.
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