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

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

> 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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

"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/

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?

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

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.

> 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?

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

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).

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

> 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.

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.

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?

covfefe was at ~71

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