>DFW was 24 when Broom of the System was published
>Marek Hlasko was 23 when Eighth Day of the Week was published
>F.S. Fitzgerald was 23 when This Side of Paradise was published
>Carson McCullers was 23 when The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published
>Tao Lin was 24 when EEEEE EEE EEEE & Bed were published
>Italo Calvino was 23 when The Path to the Nest of the Spiders was published
>Kerouac was 20 when The Sea is My Brother was published
>Goethe was 25 when The Sorrows of Young Werther was published
>Musil was 25 when The Confusions of Young Torless was published
>Hemingway was 25 when In Our Time was published
>Tatsuhiko Takimoto was 24 when Welcome to the NHK was published
>Ryu Murakami was 24 when Almost Transparent Blue was published
>Garcia Marquez was 20 when Eyes of a Blue Dog was published
>Nietzsche was 18 when "Napoleon III as a President" was published
>Nietzsche was 18 when "Fate and History" was published
>Nietzsche was 18 when Free Will and Fate was published
>Nietzsche was 19 when "Can the Envious Ever Truly Be Happy?" was published
>Nietzsche was 20 when "On Tendencies" was published
>Nietzsche was 20 when "My Life" was published
>Saramago was 25 years old when Land of Sun was published
>Dickens was 24 when Sketches by Boz was published
>Dickens was 25 when The Pickwick Papers was published
>Huxley was 25 when Limbo was published
>James Joyce was 25 when Chamber Music was published
>Proust was 25 when Pleasures and Days was published
>Mishima was 23 when Confessions of a Mask was published
>Bret Easton Ellis was 21 when Less Than Zero was published
>Kenzaburō Ōe was 23 when Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids was published
>Emile Zola was 24 when Contes à Ninon was published
>Balzac was 20 when Cromwell was published
>Baudelaire was 24 when Salon of 1845 was published
>Hitomi Kanehara was 20 when Snakes and Earrings was published
>Stig Dagerman was 23 when Ormen was published
>Strindberg was 22 when The Outlaw was published
>Ibsen was 22 when Catiline was published
>Milan Kundera was 24 when Man: A Wide Garden was published
>Adam Thirwell was 24 when Politics was published
>Ned Beaumann was 25 when Boxer, Beetle was published
>Norman Mailer was 25 when The Naked and the Dead was published
>Eleanor Catton was 22 when The Rehearsal was published
>Robert Walser was 23 when Schneewittchen was published
>Noah Cicero was 23 when The Human War was published
>Jorge Luis Borges was 24 when Fervor de Buenos Aires was published
>Tolstoy was 24 when Childhood was published
>Johan Harstad was 23 when Amublance was published
>Kim Insuk was 20 when Bloodline was published
>Evelyn Waugh was 25 when Decline and Fall was published
How do you cope with this?
DFW was 24 when Broom of the System was published
The sea is my brother by Kerouac was published long after his death. Lol.
I'll never amount to anything
OP, this is a great list, but unfortunately I think but few of the dimbulbs on this board will appreciate it.
You should include Rimbaud and John Kennedy toole.
Forgot to mention Keats, who left behind his whole ouevre at the age of 24. There's no hope for us.
>Nietzsche was 20 when "My Life" was published
How much of a fucking douche do you have to be to write an autobiography at age 20?
>He doesn't write his autobiography full time for a living
what a sad petty life
Isn't that just a blahg?
.....good point.
99% of those authors weren't also required to resist the temptation of brainless consumption of pleasurable pursuits to trick their brain into a constant state of freedom from hardship.
rates of procrastination have increased from something like 5% to 25% over the past few decades.
they had more cranial capacity to dedicate to their work, that is how i cope
only rimbaud ever saddened me and he isn't even on your list
to your question: i gave up
Tolstoy started Anna Karenina at 45
i wrote stuff at age 22 that i dont think any human will ever equal and i dont even vaguely care if it is ever published or seen by anyone who wasn't around me at the time. nothing could ever convince me that wasn't basically the essence of heaven made real on earth, as was the entire experience of that period
And they are all juvenile, edgy, I have to prove myself works. I don't deny that infinitely superior people exist but what you posted is some low-brow and below average mid-brow at very best. If you think any of this works are good you're new to this board and literature/philosophy.
richard adams didn't write his first book, watership down, until he was in his 50s
lol bro but did you know dickens was a retard or something damn ive got a shot at this legit
Post it then.
I'm 23 and my mother loves me
>Tatsuhiko Takimoto was 24 when Welcome to the NHK was published
What a random addition. Also the least impressive on the list, Mann writing Buddenbrooks at such a young age should be there though
How did they know they ought to write for a living? What was the catalyst, positive feedback, epiphany, a deep pain from not writing? I enjoy the act of writing but accept I have no insights or fun tricks to offer a reader and anything I compose creates suffering. The capabilities of these authors to render such complex and powerful things from some mysterious source of writing is bewildering, but it's so clear they had so much to say on top of their great techniques. When you learn some of them are English professors (Gass, DFW) it makes more sense because you understand they had this rich professional cultivation to access. Still, I'm sure there's user's ITT or those in prior threads like this who will challenge these patterns. We look forward to reading what you want to write, anons.
They had more opportunities
>What was the catalyst, positive feedback, epiphany, a deep pain from not writing?
Nothing so positive as you said; I'd expect young novelists writing for a career are mostly just at a loss as to what else they could possibly do with themselves. There is a genuine love of reading and writing, but pursuing writing fulltime always carries an element of risk, and all too often career writers are clearly too inept to do anything else. It's really a kind of compulsive habit, and for those who are lucky enough to "make it" young, or even start young and later "make it" in their thirties or fourties (not just luck of circumstance or publication but also luck of background, education, style, content) it looks far more impressive than in the cases of all those unknowns who devote their lives to no reward, dully evaporating into despairing dust.
all this tells me is that it took a bit of practice before they published something of worth
All clear cases worth looking up to, but circumstances are culturally and economically much different than in times of these figures and one shouldn't distract oneself with such musings.
>dully evaporating into despairing dust.
Oh, God. What have I done......
Most of them were amateurish attempts. Post their age when they publish their masterpiece.
It's not too late to be a doctor or an engineer.
Based Burgess representing the boomers
>tfw your favorite authors were late bloomers
I still have a chance, r-right?
who cares. who even needs a publisher. just publish your shit online in blogs and shit. only way to destroy the publisher brick wall is to not support it.
This guy is the saddest human I’ve ever seen.
Given that most of the younger books are the garbagest iterations of their respective authors, you're most likely to succeed if you start now, regardless of whether or not you're immediately recognized. Having a catalogue of juvenalia prior to being a hit (i.e. having a larger oeuvre) also means that your earlier books will become a retroactive hit for die-hard fans and academics and so on, even if they're utter garbage, increasing royalties flow and recognition.
Dude Elliot Roger did exactly the same thing and he was based asf
Cervantes was 58 when he published Don Quijote de La Mancha. Chin up. Don't let this fag drag you down.
Pleb book
Yeah but he started writing it as an infant.
>[your name here] self published his novel at 26!
Melville once wrote to Hawthorne that his intellectual life did not begin until he was 24 years old, and he wrote Moby-Dick, his first really good work, at 32.
Don't compare yourself to others, OP. Compare yourself to yourself. Those people lived in a completely different time than you and experienced entirely different circumstances. What's the point? Go ahead and feel down about it, but when you're done feeling down go and write. It's what everyone on that list did.
Just Dostoevsky being absent from that list is enough
He was only 14 when he wrote it
Do you have a source for this letter?
John Stuart Mill was able to read Plato in the original Greek by the age of four. Hannah Arendt was 14 when she first read Critique of Pure Reason. None of you is ever gonna make it.
More like they had absurdly high IQs, let's not kid ourselves here.
Mill completely wasted his erudition though, anyone is smarter than him by simply not expounding something as ugly as utilitarianism.
Yeah but Tolstoy had to write a lot of stuff before he was able to progress into a level where he could write Anna Karenina at 45
If a guy enjoys fucking my wife more than i do he must be allowed to do it amirite ;)
He's a NEET so it serves as inspiration for some of the guys here
Yeah, probably, but should that make a difference? If you want to write then write. Doing things like seeing how old everyone was when they got published (and many great people got published late) isn't doing a person any favors. His problem is probably doubt more than intellect
I read about it in a book called Melville’s Religious Thought by William Braswell, I’m sure it says what letter it comes from specifically. Northwestern Press also has a full set of all of Melville’s work, letters, and journals, so if you tracked down the volume of his letters you could find it.
Are you surprised that Nietzsche was a pseud?
Noah was over 90 when the Bible was written.
*900
At least Dazai's first collection of short stories wasn't published until he was 27
How old are you, anons?
Honest question. Why do you guys write for? It's natural to flirt with the idea of fame and success, but with that aside, do you have any reason to force yourself into such a laborious task?
I love posts like this. They always crack me up.
Why is 24 the major year?
Writing is like a save file
It might come a bit late in the thread and it might be too specific, but it's funny that you would mention Saramago in a thread about age anxieties.
I can't think of a better example of a late-bloomer than him in literary history. He did publish Land of Sin at 25, but he only published his next novel at 55, and even then no one gave a shit. Afterwards, he still published another accepted but largely ignored novel before publishing Memorial do Convento, his best known work, at age 60. And he still got the Nobel Prize.
So quit moping and get writing.
This is cliche, but it's just what I do. I've used my imagination a lot ever since I was a kid and have been "writing" for a long time, coming up with stories and people in my head before ever being into books. Writing is an extension of that. I could not write and I would still just come up with stories anyway.
"major" is quite deceiving. silly poems and short stories shouldn't count.
This
He could have just read Hume, who had long digested and done away with the idea of utilitarianism by the time Bentham first opened his perfidious anglo mouth, and saved his future.
i'm 23. i cope by telling myself i'll be published by 24/25
>pynchon 26
I thought he was 24 when V came out?
>How do you cope with this?
I don't care.
this. there's too much porn and my refractory period is too long for me to ever have a shred of a hope of fapping to all of it.
based
You all seem to forget our great friend Raymond Radiguet who managed to write and publish a couple of novels and some poems in just 20 years of life. He also had a lot of success with both women and men, he really embodied the spirit of Yea Forums.