With Age Comes...Masterpieces?

Below is but a tiny list of writers and philosophers who composed their best work late in life.

Plato. Dates are uncertain, but it is believed that many of his important dialogues -- e.g., Crito, Symposium, Phaedo -- were written sometime during or after middle age (he was 81 when he died). It "may be," notes The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "that Plato's career as a writer of dialogues began fifteen or twenty years after the execution of...Socrates, that is, when Plato was well past middle age."

Dante Alighieri. Began writing the Commedia at age 37. The epic poem was completed when he was nearly 55 years old.

Jane Austen. Published Pride And Prejudice at age 38.

Charles Dickens. Published David Copperfield at age 37, Tale of Two Cities at 47, and Great Expectations at 49.

Fyodor Dostoevsky. Published Notes From The Underground when he was 43 years old, Crime And Punishment when he was 45, and The Brothers Karamazov when he was 58.

James Joyce. Published Ulysses at age 40, Finnegans Wake at age 57. 

Leo Tolstoy. Published War And Peace sometime between ages 37 and 41.

Edgar Allen Poe. Published The Raven at age 36, four years before his death.

Mark Twain. Published Tom Sawyer at age 41, Huckleberry Finn at 49, and A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court at 54. 

William James. Published Principles of Psychology at age 48, The Varieties of Religious Experience at 60, Pragmatism at 65, and several other titles during the last five years of his life.

George Santayana. Published The Last Puritan, his only novel, at age 73, and Dominations And Powers, his only work of political philosophy, at 88.

Bertrand Russell. Published Principia Mathematica (with Alfred North Whitehead) at age 38, "A Free Man's Worship" at age 53, A History of Western Philosophy at 73, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism at 78, and his three-volume Autobiography well into his nineties! 

Virginia Woolf. Published To The Lighthouse at age 45, The Waves at 49.

Marshall McLuhan. Published Understanding Media, his most important work, when he was 53.

Joseph Heller. Published Catch-22 at age 38, Something Happened at 51.