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Was Ben Franklin A Late Bloomer?
This month, while many of us made manifestos and broke resolutions, Ben Franklin (1706-1790), the original American smarty pants and grandfather of getting things done, would have celebrated his 311th...
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The Flowering of Mary Delany’s Ingenious Mind: At Age 72 She Invented Collage!
An ingenious mind is never too old to learn. ~Mary Granville Delany The pancratium maritimum, or sea daffodil, grows on beaches along the Mediterranean. Examine the stamen antennae, fluid white petals,...
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Freya Stark: The Passionate Life of a Late-Blooming Explorer
“There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.” ~Freya Stark My great-uncle Bob arrived in his 1958 Chevy Bel Air, dapper in a tweed suit and fedora. A...
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Was Jules Verne, Futurist Extraordinaire, a Late Bloomer?
“But the Earth is very large, and life is very short! In order to leave a completed work behind, one would need to live to be at least 100 years old!” ~Jules Verne Do you consider 35 too young to be a...
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Charles Darwin’s Love Song: The Workings of Wonder
A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life. —Charles Darwin In the 2009 film Creation, Charles Darwin (Paul Bettany) struggles with writer’s block, suffers from...
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The Love Song of Charles Robert Darwin
The Love Song of Charles Robert Darwin by Debra Eve Darwin published On the Origin of Species at age 50, after waiting more than two decades. Experts have called it his “incredible procrastination.”...
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How Alex Haley Went from College Dropout to Pulitzer Prizewinner
In June 1977, I vaguely recall graduating from high school. I’d wanted to leave five months earlier since I’d finished my coursework. But I was the co-captain of our championship dance team and felt...
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How Madeleine L’Engle’s Most Popular Book Almost Didn’t Get Published #writing
You have to write the book that wants to be written…if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children. Recently Amazon US announced that The Hunger Games had outsold Harry...
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Penelope Fitzgerald: Saved By A Sinking Houseboat
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity. The Guardian UK has called...
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The Late-Blooming General Who Wrote Ben-Hur
“To catch a boy and hold him fast one has only to set the delicate machinery of the wonder-box in him at work.” —Lew Wallace I. General Lew Wallace, tall upon the back of his stallion Old John, paused...
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How Bram Stoker Handled A Soul-Sucking Boss
Recently I attended the opening of a gourmet confectionary called R&R Chocolate Palace. As I reached for a Wild Harvested Bolivian truffle, a botoxed woman asked, “Are you in The Industry too?” The...
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How One Late-Blooming Author Turned a Publishing Fiasco into Hilarious...
Dame P.D. James maintains, “Nothing that happens to a novelist is ever wasted.” Case in point: As her boyfriend guns his Harley into the sunset, a writer named Anne contemplates a drawer full of...
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The Strange Surprising Deeds of Daniel Defoe
On the night of November 24, the winter wind turned murderous. It toppled walls and sent the Thames River raging into people’s cellars. Within 48 hours, that wind mutated into the worst storm in...
View ArticleWhy 26 Publishers Rejected Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time
Madeleine L'Engle was over age 40 when she wrote her beloved book. Yet 26 publishers rejected A Wrinkle in Time because they felt children couldn't fathom evil.
View ArticleLilian Jackson Braun: An Unsung Late Bloomer and Her Genius Cat
At age 53, Lilian Jackson Braun published her first novel featuring a feline gumshoe. But her fourth was rejected because it didn't contain sex and violence. She took a break and came back more popular...
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