Writers’ Career Paths, Part 2: Peaking at the Beginning, Middle, or End?

The writer Joseph Heller published his first novel Catch-22 in 1961 at the age of 38. He went on to publish six more novels, as well as plays, screenplays, and two autobiographies. I have only read some of his later books, and Good as Gold was memorable, but I don’t think many readers would dispute that his first book was his best.

Joseph Heller with his family, not long after the publication of Catch-22

I knew Joseph Heller a little bit growing up. His daughter Erica and I were classmates and friends in our early teens. Joseph Heller was as funny as his books. Tall, broad-shouldered, he towered over most people. He used to describe himself as “The World’s Tallest Midget.” But I digress.

Publishing his best book first put Joseph Heller in excellent company. There was also Charlotte Brontë, who wrote Jane Eyre at age of 31 before any of her other novels. J.D. Salinger authored many good books, but I think the consensus is that his first book, The Catcher in the Rye, is the classic of all his works.

Why would a writer create her or his best book right at the beginning of a career, before that person has the experience, maturity, and craft to polish a work to a shining finish? Sometimes that first great plot or narrator’s voice that gets a writer on the page is so good, it just can’t be outdone. Many writers who write their best book first keep trying to recreate that magic, but hey—writing one great book is nothing to sneeze at! How many have done it?

More common as a trajectory for writers is to produce the best books in mid-career. One great example of this is Virginia Woolf. She published her first book, The Voyage Out, in 1915 at the age of 33. In my opinion, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad book, but she certainly hit her stride in the middle of her career, when she published in succession Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando, (1928), and A Room of One’s Own (1929). That has to be one of the best four-year runs in the history of literature. Her subsequent novels were also good, but, in my opinion, not up to that amazing mid-career burst.

There are many other examples of writers who warm up with a few books of fair to middling quality, then write their masterpiece(s), and finish a career with works that don’t quite measure up. In his early years Leo Tolstoy wrote three autobiographical novels that are rarely read. Those were the prelude to War and Peace and Anna Karenina, which he penned in middle age, but didn’t equal again in his later years, despite his fame. 

It makes sense that peaking in mid-career is the most common path—at this stage, the writer has acquired some chops, and has begun to discover which themes are closest to the heart. Energy and originality are still relatively easy to access.

Another familiar example of this trajectory is Gustave Flaubert, who wrote Madame Bovary in mid-career. But the author Dorothy Bryant argues in her play Dear Master based on the correspondence of Flaubert and George Sand that all his previous work led up to the exquisite novella “A Simple Heart,” which he wrote toward the end of his life.

Dorothy Bryant

That leads us to the third type of author, one who is striving to write a certain kind of book all his or her years, and realizes that ambition after many false starts, only at the end of a career. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke authored books of poetry from his adolescence, but one could argue that his greatest period was a stretch of only a few weeks in February 1922, four years before his death, when two of his most celebrated books poured out of him, almost as if dictated: Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. At least, that is the legend that Rilke promoted, which was good business, since it gave those two later books a special status.

George Orwell wrote excellent nonfiction from the start of his career, but only his devoted fans (like me!) read his early fiction. Right at the end of his life, though, he wrote both Animal Farm and 1984, his two most famous and widely read works.

One can also see the rationale behind the career that climaxes in a best book or books. It can take a whole lifetime to get it right, to assemble the toolbox that a writer needs to build the dream house, the work that brings together the themes that eluded the author at a less mature stage, with all the craft it takes to realize that blueprint.

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Has the Best Literature Already Been Written?

It’s very easy to fall into the mindset that there’s not much point in writing anymore, since the best writing has already been written. After all, who is going to write a lyric poem better than Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments...”? Who could out-do his Sonnet 55, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme...” so bold in its claim, so democratic in its implications.

The Bard Guy

But imagine if all the writers since Shakespeare had thrown away their quills or pens or clunky manual typewriters with stuck keys and said, “No way I’m going to measure up to the Bard Guy.” Think of the many thousands of works of literature we wouldn’t have, from Wordsworth’s sonnets to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God to Neruda’s poems of surrealist angst in Residencia en tierra? Make your own list. Probably the majority of great literature was written after the Golden Age of Petrarch to Shakespeare was ancient history.

You might still say that the works of even those more recent classic writers I just listed are out of reach now, since our daily speech has declined in the age of texting and singers with dollar signs in their names to the point where we can’t reach the peaks of the literary sublime. Maybe. But what an interesting challenge that is, to try to create a moment of heightened language and emotion in a world where that is not the norm, where new literary classics are as rare as pulling an emerald from the dirt!

Rather than assume that literature has seen its best days, why not think of what literature has not been attempted yet?

Have we melded literature as fully as we can with the other arts and technologies? Heck, no. (Who said that?)

Have we taken literature authentically into the realms of intimacy that have been so private up till now?

Have we written about the new shapes that relationships and families are taking in our world?

Have we laid out the radical equality and justice and sustainability that will allow our world to survive this age of splits—of faiths, families, nations, and atoms?

Yes, there may be a trade-off. We may not be able to duplicate the lacy sounds of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, or the intricate dance of Dante’s terza rima. But we have the benefit of hundreds of years of history and change since Jacobean England and Trecento Italy, change that has given us, I hope, new insights. There are new musics, new asymmetries of elegance to reveal.

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Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
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For the Russian Writers Protesting Putin’s Crackdown on Dissent

A remarkable event happened in Moscow on, May 13, 2012. Twelve Russian writers organized a walk to protest President Vladimir Putin’s recent attacks on dissidents, and 10,000 Russian citizens turned out to join them, defying police and the recent mass arrests and physical attacks on demonstrators in Moscow and elsewhere. I salute all those brave human rights protestors.

That amazing event in 2012 was an attempt to reverse the Russian government’s brazen crackdown on dissent, including the military’s statement that they would conscript any young men protesting Vladimir Putin’s third inauguration as president, and the arrest of more than 650 who were demonstrating against the swearing-in.

The turnout for the May 13, 2012 walk by the Russian writers, from the statue of poet and playwright Aleksander Pushkin to the statue of playwright Aleksandr Griboyedov, was testimony to two important facts. First, a great many Russians revere their writers and love literature. Not a small thing, in the age of reality TV and gladiator-style entertainment. Second, Russian writers have often stood side by side with the people of Russia. From novelist Leo Tolstoy freeing his serfs, to poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s revolutionary politics, to Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam circulating secret poems to protest Stalin’s purges, to Solzhenitsyn’s documentation of Soviet prison camps, Russian writers have taken a strong stand in support of human rights. 

The bond between Russian writers and the Russian people is closely connected to the moral vein in that country’s writing. When I say “moral,” I don’t mean “moralistic.” I mean bravely speaking out in the face of dictatorship, or dictatorial actions by the current government.

North American authors have much to learn from the example of the dozen Russian writers who called the 2012 protest walk. Where are the writers of the United States protesting the enormous weight of debt that burdens so many households in our country, when annual interest rates on credit cards soar above 20%? Where are the writers calling for demonstrations against the U.S. dependence on fossil fuels? When are writers going to announce a protest of our military budget, now $700 billion annually, while our people lack health care and quality schools, and the number of homeless is in the hundreds of thousands?

Yes, writers are marginalized in the U.S., but part of that we have inflicted on ourselves, by avoiding the issues that are most pressing for our people.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

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