Are You Too Old to Become a Successful Writer?

When William Golding published his first novel, Lord of the Flies, in 1954, one reviewer said he was too old to start writing fiction. Golding was 43, hardly what we’d think of as elderly. But, for that reviewer and many others, fiction writing was a game for the just-out-of-college set.Times—and attitudes about aging—have changed since the 50s, but not as much as we might think. I once heard Amy Tan described as a “late bloomer” because she didn’t publish her first novel until she was 37. Not long ago, I read an interview with a prominent author by a reporter who asked the ridiculous question: “What is it like to be writing at 72?” The answer, of course, would be: Pretty much the same as writing at 20—except that you’re a lot smarter.

Anyone who thinks they’re too old to start writing—or who uses any excuse for not following their dream—should take a look at the career of Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux.

Foveaux wasn’t an educated woman and didn’t see herself as a writer. She started a memoir about her life as a single mother just to tell her story. When the instructor of her writing class at the local learning center sent her work to the Wall Street Journal, they published an article about it. That set off a bidding frenzy for rights to her memoir. Jessie Foveaux received a one million dollar advance for Any Given Day. She was 98.

Foveaux might be the most dramatic example of an author who made it late in life, but she’s far from the only one. Harriet Doerr left college at the age of 20 to get married. More than forty years later, she returned, graduated, and started writing. Her first novel, the National Book Award winner Stones for Ibarra was published when she was 74.

Helen Hooven Santmyer published two novels in her early thirties, but she was an 84-year-old nursing home resident when she wrote And Ladies of the Club which spent 37 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than a million copies.

From the tender age of 22, Peter Drucker wrote ponderous tomes of scholarship like The End of Economic Man and Power and Democracy in America, but he was in his 70s when he published his first work of fiction.

Norman Maclean’s first book, A River Runs through It and Other Stories gave him an enduring place in American literature. It was published when he was 74.

Frank McCourt, Laura Ingalls Wilder . . . the list goes on.

It’s easy to come up with excuses for not writing. It’s also easy to feel discouraged if your writing career isn’t where you’d like it to be as you turn 30 or 50 or 70. But the next time you start thinking you’re too old to make it as a writer—or too busy, poor, uneducated, untalented, or uninspired–remember Jessie Foveaux. Write your excuses down. Burn the paper. Silence your internal naysayers. Pick up your pen.