Robert McCrum in the Observer:
Keats was 21 when On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer appeared. Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis before he was 30. Dickens caused a sensation with Pickwick Papers aged 25. Across the Atlantic, JD Salinger published Catcher in the Rye aged 32...
F Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise , came out when he was 24 and The Great Gatsby when he was just 29. Precocity has its perils. "There are," Fitzgerald later observed, "no second acts in American lives...
As you might expect, great books come with some maturity - but not too much. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet aged 36. The mid-thirties seem to be the age at which the majority of the classics are completed. Here's a few, chosen at random: War and Peace (37); Midnight's Children (34); A House for Mister Biswas (30); Catch-22 (38), Portnoy's Complaint (36) and Hard Times (38).... Read on here
So do you think Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Upamanyu Chatterjee are all past it? (Please note that the question is not about Sirji Vidyadharji Surajprasadji Naipaulji)
Anil Arora, Mr. Bookworm, R.I.P.
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