It's Never Too Late to Produce the Great American [fill in the blank]

We've all heard the stories about artistic wunderkinds. In school, we learned about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was a famous composer as a teenager, and romantic poet John Keats, who accomplished a lifetime of work in just four years before his demise at age 26.

We grew up idolizing actor James Dean, who is ranked 18^th on the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 male movie stars, despite having made just three movies in his early twenties, and jazz great Charlie Parker, who came up with revolutionary harmonic ideas when he was 19.

Those examples make it easy to assume that rising meteorically and flaming out just as quickly is the only route to creating great art. That notion may have seemed romantic when we were in our teens, but it's a bit of a downer for those of us who are well past even the advanced age of 29 at which Jack Kerouac pounded out On the Road in just three weeks on a single roll of paper strips pasted together, or even those years between 30 and 40, when Vincent Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock produced their best paintings. Nevertheless, many of us still dream of unlocking our creativity and painting a masterpiece or writing the novel that for years has existed only in our imaginations, now that we finally have the time, the drive and the self-confidence to actually give it a try. But is the artistic second act just another way of clinging to the dreams of our youth, or is it actually possible?

The truth, reassuringly, is that there's plenty of room in the artistic pantheon for both prodigies and late bloomers. University of Chicago economics professor David W. Galenson, author of the 2007 book Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, has tracked the ages at which various innovative artists made their greatest contributions to the field. He has identified two different types of artistic minds.

Conceptualists make radical innovations in their field at a very early age, while Experimentalists develop their inspirations slowly, over a long period of experimentation and refinement. Galenson has actually discovered that the later-life art of some late-blooming experimentalist painters actually is valued much more highly by collectors than their youthful work. Works created by Paul Cézanne in his sixties, for example, on average command 15 times the price of paintings he did as a young man. Here's a 2008 New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell that discusses Galenson's theories about later-life creativity. He also looks at the example of Ben Fountain, a former attorney who spent years teaching himself to write fiction at his kitchen table before finally winning the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for his short stories in 2007, at age 46.

Indeed, there are plenty of other examples of artists who had previous careers in other professions, and didn't begin to produce great work until midlife. Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin drew and painted at an early age, but his first job was as a merchant seaman, and he then went to work at a brokerage in the Paris Bourse, France's equivalent of Wall Street, where as a clerk he meticulously recorded the purchases and sales of clients' stocks. He went on to labor for 14 years in the brokerage business in Paris and Copenhagen before finally abandoning that career to become a full-time artist. Ultimately, he fled to Tahiti in search of his muse. As his wife Mette told a biographer: "He painted because he could not do otherwise." (Here's a link to an excellent book on the artist, Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life.)

But perhaps the quintessential artistic late bloomer was crime novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler, whose first aspiration in life was to be a civil servant. When that career turned out not to suit him, he tried several other jobs, from working as a newspaper reporter to stringing tennis rackets. After taking a correspondence course in accounting, he became a bookkeeper, and eventually rose to the position of vice president at a California oil company. But then, in 1932, Chandler, who had a lifelong struggle with alcoholism, was fired from that job. Desperate to support himself and his wife, Cissy, Chandler began writing stories and peddling them to the then-popular pulp magazines. He didn't publish his first novel, The Big Sleep, until seven years later, at age 51. But that book and his subsequent ones, such as Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye, became templates for the modern genre of hard-boiled crime fiction. Here's a recording of a 1958 radio program in which Chandler was interviewed by another literary late bloomer, Ian Fleming--himself a former journalist, stock broker and military intelligence officer who didn't publish his first novel, Casino Royale, until age 45.