Fifty late bloomers
It's launch week for Second Act!
The next Shakespeare bookclub is now **19th May**—it was pointed out that 12th is Mothers’ Day in the USA… sorry!
It’s UK launch week of Second Act, so here are fifty late bloomers to whet your appetite. And here’s a tweet thread from Dan Rothschild that praises Second Act in *precisely* the terms that matter most to me: “This is not a work of therapeutic managerialism.”
If you want to know more about late bloomers pre-order Second Act today. It comes out Thursday but copies are already arriving!
Amazon UK. | Amazon US. | Amazon Canada.
Frank Lloyd Wright did half of his life’s work after the age of 68, including the Guggenheim.
Before he was unexpectedly picked as a Senate candidate aged 50, Harry Truman thought he would retire or take a sinecure job.
Rani Hamid only started playing chess aged 34. She became Bangladesh’s first International Woman Master.
Gladys Burrill completed the Honolulu Marathon aged 92.
Ynés Mexía started studying botany aged 51 and went on to discover fifty new species of plants.
Michael Ramsay founded TiVo aged 47.
Emma Rowena Gatewood became the first woman to solo hike the Appalachian Trail aged sixty-seven.
Freeman Dyson published a new solution to the prisoner’s dilemma aged eighty-eight.
Mary Delany invented a form of paper-cutting in her seventies and created nearly a thousand detailed illustrations of botanical specimens.
Ray Charles won a Grammy aged seventy-four.
Laura Ingalls Wilder started writing Little House on the Prairie at sixty-five.
Gertrude Jekyll, the famous garden designer, started her career in her forties.
John Goodenough developed the lithium-ion battery the year before he was forced to retire from Oxford. He was still an active professor in Texas aged ninety-nine and is the oldest Nobel laureate in history.
Knut Wicksell spent fourteen years in graduate school. He later made significant contributions in economics.
Marjorie Rice was in her fifties when she discovered new forms of pentagonal tessellation in geometry. She was an amateur with only a high school diploma.
Helen Downie started painting aged fifty. By posting her work on Instagram, Downie ended up collaborating with Gucci.
Ruth Wilson, a former elocution teacher in Australia, emerged from a depression in her sixties by rereading Jane Austen. Wilson went on to achieve a PhD in Jane Austen aged eighty-eight.
Robin Chase was a stay-at-home mother with an MBA before she founded Zipcar, aged forty-two. (She doesn’t think of herself as a late bloomer.)
Siphiwe Baleka nearly became an Olympic swimmer aged fifty. (He was denied the chance to represent Guinea-Bissau because of a technicality.)
Gerald Stratford became famous online for growing big vegetables in his retirement; he is now the ‘Twitter King of Big Veg’ and has published a book. Before this, he was a butcher and a barge controller on the Thames.
Carl Allamby was an auto mechanic for twenty-five years before he went to medical school aged forty.
Cervantes wrote Don Quixote from prison late in life.
The mathematician Eugène Ehrhart graduated high school aged twenty-two and finished his PhD aged sixty.
Charles Spearman, the psychologist who developed the theory of general intelligence, started his PhD aged thirty-four, paused it to fight in the Second Boer War, and completed it aged forty-one.
Toussaint Louverture began leading the Haitian Revolution aged forty-eight; he had been a slave himself until the age of thirty-three, and a property owner after that.
If you want to know more about late bloomers pre-order Second Act today. It comes out Thursday but copies are already arriving!
Amazon UK. | Amazon US. | Amazon Canada.Alan Kay was one of the oldest PhDs to join the Californian research and development company PARC. He studied mathematics and molecular biology, computer science not being a degree at that time; he learned to code aged twenty-two in the US Air Force; he got his undergraduate degree aged twenty-six and his PhD aged twenty-nine.
At twenty, Malcolm Little was in jail, showing no signs of his later brilliance as a preacher, political communicator, orator, and civil rights leader. By twenty-five, he was Malcolm X.
Jay-Z didn’t release his first album until he was twenty-six.
Winston Churchill’s career was thought to be finished before the Second World War.
There has been a recent vogue for Stoicism — we should remember that Seneca wrote his famous letters in his final years.
English philosopher Mary Midgley wrote her first book at fifty-nine.
Viola Davis spent decades playing mainly supporting roles before becoming a television, and now film, star later in her career.
Instead of retiring, Michelangelo became the architect of St Peter’s.
Penelope Fitzgerald’s most successful novel was her last, written in her late seventies. She began writing fiction in her sixties.
Joseph Conrad didn’t start writing fiction until he was in his thirties.
Julia Child was thirty-seven before she went to France and attended Cordon Bleu cooking school. She then spent a decade writing The Art of French Cookery.
Aged 27, Carl Bernstein was at risk of being fired. A year later got the Watergate assignment.
Ray Kroc was 58 when he discovered a small family restaurant called McDonalds. Before that he was a milkshake mixer salesman.
Audrey Sutherland solo explored and kayaked the coasts of Alaska and British Columbia in her sixties, seventies, and eighties. Before that, she had never explored in artic waters before.
Ronald Coase’s two critical papers – ‘The Nature of the Firm’ and ‘The Problem of Social Cost’ – were published when he was twenty-seven and fifty. They were both revolutionary and contributed to Coase’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991.
John B. Fenn won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for a paper published in 1991, after he had been forcibly retired from Yale.
Vera Wang started designing dresses aged 40.
Rosalind Arden studied art history before producing science documentaries for television. She got a PhD in behavioural genetics late in her career and is now a research fellow at the LSE.
Eric Yuan founded Zoom aged forty-one.
Robin Hanson started his PhD aged 34.
Kenichi Horie sailed solo across the Pacific aged 83
Fields Medal winner June Huh didn’t start taking maths seriously until the end of college: he had wanted to become a poet.
Michelangelo did almost no painting for a fifteen-year period in his forties and fifties. He then produced The Last Judgment.
The movie director Ava DuVernay didn’t pick up a camera until she was thirty-two.
David Duffield founded Workday aged 64. It is now worth more than $43 billion.
If you want to know more about late bloomers pre-order Second Act today. It comes out Thursday but copies are already arriving!
Amazon UK. | Amazon US. | Amazon Canada.
Hokusai was into his seventies when he painted the The Great Wave. He thought he was still an apprentice, might get the hang of things in his 80s and finaly hit his stride in his 90s.
Superb list - but don't forget Mary Wesley!