There doesn’t always need to be a dramatic story to later-life publication — sometimes a writer may just be spending a couple of decades reading, writing, working, and living enough to know what it is he’s writing about. Often those intervening years are simply about showing up.
Post-40 Bloomer: David Abrams Taking As Long As It Takes by Lisa Peet
There was no stopping her now. She wrote like a woman possessed, scrawling on the back of old manuscripts and whatever she could find. She had a soft touch for dark themes, offering deception and adultery the same respect as the rest of the natural world they occupied. The only sin she couldn’t forgive her characters was cruelty.
Post-40 Bloomer: Mary Wesley, That Sort of Girl by Lisa Peet
“Walker Percy, author of the 1962 National Book Award-winning novel The Moviegoer, believed in the power of film on many levels — as a means of escape, as the unifier of cultural experience, as a metaphor for all the ways we tell each other stories. And in fact his own life story had the kind of arc that could have been pulled straight from a movie of just about any era. Perhaps that’s why he identified with the medium, perhaps that’s why he found both hope and despair in it.” — Post-40 Bloomers: Walker Percy, The Original Moviegoer by Lisa Peet
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“Walker Percy, author of the 1962 National Book Award-winning novel The Moviegoer, believed in the power of film on many levels — as a means of escape, as the unifier of cultural experience, as a metaphor for all the ways we tell each other stories. And in fact his own life story had the kind of arc that could have been pulled straight from a movie of just about any era. Perhaps that’s why he identified with the medium, perhaps that’s why he found both hope and despair in it.”

— Post-40 Bloomers: Walker Percy, The Original Moviegoer by Lisa Peet

“Karen Christentze Dinesen, nicknamed Tanne, was born on Denmark’s coast just north of Copenhagen, in 1885. A stormy and creative child, Tanne balked at her mother’s moral restraint. Her father, on the other hand, was her idol, swashbuckling and at ease in the world. They took daily walks together and he told her tales of his time hunting and trapping in America, his cabin in Wisconsin, his kinship with the local Chippewas. These attentions confirmed what she had always believed — that she was special, destined for greatness. When he committed suicide she was left, at age ten, to make sense of her story alone — and she would keep doing so for the rest of her life.” — Post-40 Bloomers: Isak Dinesen, Her Own Heroine by Lisa Peet [Image source]
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“Karen Christentze Dinesen, nicknamed Tanne, was born on Denmark’s coast just north of Copenhagen, in 1885. A stormy and creative child, Tanne balked at her mother’s moral restraint. Her father, on the other hand, was her idol, swashbuckling and at ease in the world. They took daily walks together and he told her tales of his time hunting and trapping in America, his cabin in Wisconsin, his kinship with the local Chippewas. These attentions confirmed what she had always believed — that she was special, destined for greatness. When he committed suicide she was left, at age ten, to make sense of her story alone — and she would keep doing so for the rest of her life.”

— Post-40 Bloomers: Isak Dinesen, Her Own Heroine by Lisa Peet

[Image source]

Source: themillions.com