No; thanks! Can you remember instances of people he put in each cluster? I’d think Mozart would be a young master, and Beethoven an old genius.
I don’t know that anybody gets better over time in literature, at least technically. I wonder whether there’s any correlation between a novel’s (rank order / total number of novels) and its status. An analysis would be muddied by the anecdotally-observed effect that the more critically acclaimed an author’s novels are, the slower he writes them. (Seems to be cause-effect, since the long interval, or cessation of writing, usually comes after the critically acclaimed novel.)
What do you mean by “better technically”? Joyce’s work became more complicated and difficult to read. Does that count as getting better technically? I think most authors improve technically, but decline in inspiration.
Can you remember instances of people he put in each cluster? I’d think Mozart would be a young master, and Beethoven an old genius.
I finally remembered this comment while at home and able to access the book. His name for the artisan category was “experimental,” which makes more sense. Another distinction that I forgot to mention is that people tend to talk about the ‘body of work’ of experimentalists as important, but single works by conceptual artists stand out. If the same paintings show up in art books, then the artist is more likely to be conceptual; if every art book includes a piece by someone but they all pick different pieces, then the artist is more likely to be experimental.
Turns out he has a section on poets, and another on novelists. Among the 20th century poets, he lists Frost, Williams, Stevens, and Lowell as experimental, and Pound, Cummings, Plath, and Eliot as conceptual. For novelists, he lists Dickens, Henry James, Twain, and Woolf as experimental, and Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, and Melville as conceptual.
(He ranks Ulysses as more important as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which is itself more important than Finnegan’s Wake.)
I don’t know that anybody gets better over time in literature
Maybe Thomas Hardy, though assessing that is complicated by the fact that he basically switched completely from novels to poems partway through his career and it’s not clear how you compare the quality of such different forms.
Maybe Shakespeare; looking at a chronological list of his plays I certainly see a higher density of ones I know to be good later on. (But Shakespearean chronology is uncertain and I’m not familiar with all his plays.)
Jane Austen, kinda; the novels for which she’s famous were written in the last six years of her life. (But, tragically, all Austen’s works are early works; she died at 41.)
Dostoyevsky’s first published work was in 1846 (when he was 25). The earliest “big name” one would be “Notes from Underground”, 1864, age 43, more than half-way through his writing career (his last novel was “The Brothers Karamazov” from 1879).
Goethe was already something of a big name at 25, but his best novel is probably Wilhelm Meister (age 46) and his best play Faust part 1 (age 59).
I dunno; it looks to me as if writers get better, get worse, stay about the same, or evolve their style in ways that make comparison difficult, and all of those happen pretty often.
What I should have said was, I don’t know if there is much tendency for writers to improve over time. If you looked at a sample of 100 writers, you’d expect half of them to have done their best work in the second half of their careers if the distribution were random. To me, the random hypothesis seems closer to reality than the hypothesis that writers improve with time after they become successful.
OK, that I can believe. But I can also easily believe that some writers genuinely get better and some genuinely get worse. (I’m sure almost all get better at first, prior to their first successful publication, but that’s kinda separate.)
No; thanks! Can you remember instances of people he put in each cluster? I’d think Mozart would be a young master, and Beethoven an old genius.
I don’t know that anybody gets better over time in literature, at least technically. I wonder whether there’s any correlation between a novel’s (rank order / total number of novels) and its status. An analysis would be muddied by the anecdotally-observed effect that the more critically acclaimed an author’s novels are, the slower he writes them. (Seems to be cause-effect, since the long interval, or cessation of writing, usually comes after the critically acclaimed novel.)
Terry Pratchett.
Galenson’s example is Twain.
What do you mean by “better technically”? Joyce’s work became more complicated and difficult to read. Does that count as getting better technically? I think most authors improve technically, but decline in inspiration.
I finally remembered this comment while at home and able to access the book. His name for the artisan category was “experimental,” which makes more sense. Another distinction that I forgot to mention is that people tend to talk about the ‘body of work’ of experimentalists as important, but single works by conceptual artists stand out. If the same paintings show up in art books, then the artist is more likely to be conceptual; if every art book includes a piece by someone but they all pick different pieces, then the artist is more likely to be experimental.
Turns out he has a section on poets, and another on novelists. Among the 20th century poets, he lists Frost, Williams, Stevens, and Lowell as experimental, and Pound, Cummings, Plath, and Eliot as conceptual. For novelists, he lists Dickens, Henry James, Twain, and Woolf as experimental, and Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, and Melville as conceptual.
(He ranks Ulysses as more important as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which is itself more important than Finnegan’s Wake.)
Dubliners → Portrait of the Artist → Ulysses → Finnegans Wake?
Edit: haha, and only now do I see Douglas_Knight had the same thought.
Maybe Thomas Hardy, though assessing that is complicated by the fact that he basically switched completely from novels to poems partway through his career and it’s not clear how you compare the quality of such different forms.
Maybe Shakespeare; looking at a chronological list of his plays I certainly see a higher density of ones I know to be good later on. (But Shakespearean chronology is uncertain and I’m not familiar with all his plays.)
Jane Austen, kinda; the novels for which she’s famous were written in the last six years of her life. (But, tragically, all Austen’s works are early works; she died at 41.)
Dostoyevsky’s first published work was in 1846 (when he was 25). The earliest “big name” one would be “Notes from Underground”, 1864, age 43, more than half-way through his writing career (his last novel was “The Brothers Karamazov” from 1879).
Goethe was already something of a big name at 25, but his best novel is probably Wilhelm Meister (age 46) and his best play Faust part 1 (age 59).
I dunno; it looks to me as if writers get better, get worse, stay about the same, or evolve their style in ways that make comparison difficult, and all of those happen pretty often.
What I should have said was, I don’t know if there is much tendency for writers to improve over time. If you looked at a sample of 100 writers, you’d expect half of them to have done their best work in the second half of their careers if the distribution were random. To me, the random hypothesis seems closer to reality than the hypothesis that writers improve with time after they become successful.
OK, that I can believe. But I can also easily believe that some writers genuinely get better and some genuinely get worse. (I’m sure almost all get better at first, prior to their first successful publication, but that’s kinda separate.)