Too Old to Publish Your First Book?
Anna Sewell sold Black Beauty when she was 57.
Karen Blixen, the Danish author who wrote under the
pen name Isak Dinesen,
published her first book at age 50, and her
blockbuster, Out of Africa, at 52.
Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House
on the Prairie series,
didn’t have her first book published until she
was well into her 60s.
Richard Adams, author of the children’s
classic Watership Down,
remained unpublished until he was in his 50s.
Bangladeshi writer Nirad Chaudhuri's first book,
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian,
was published in 1951, when he was 54 years old.
Its sequel hit the market in 1988, when he was 90.
And his final book, Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse,
was published in 1997—when he was 100.