Ambition Can Creep As Well As Soar

In some magazine or another that I was reading on the plane as I came back from North Carolina, Amy Tan said that she was a "late bloomer" because she didn't publish The Joy Luck Club until she was 37.

Wow. That only gives me 7 months to meet Amy's deadline.

Fortunately, I'm not as enamored of (or cowed by) a devotion to youth culture and its illusionary definition of success. I haven't forgotten that Richard Adams didn't publish Watership Down until he was in his fifties; Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't publish The Little House series until she was in her sixties. Likewise, Raymond Chandler didn't publish his first short story until he was 45, and his first published novel, The Big Sleep, didn't appear until he was 51.

Of course, Richard, Laura, and Ray all had their breakthroughs more than 35 years ago when America at large clung a little less to the definition of youth being an essential component of success.

I'd better get cracking.