The Youthful Rise,Early Fall, and Short Span of Creativity

Abstract

Few of the brightest children on an earlier era‘s radio program, “The Quiz Kids,” are prominent today; most child prodigies fade into obscurity as they grow older. For youngsters who enter music competitions, for example, “Victory [in youth] is not a guaranteed ticket into the classical music pantheon. Politics, personal health, changing musical fashions, and the mysterious vagaries of personality, not to mention sheer luck, can be as strong determining factors as raw talent in the trajectory of a career” (Holden, 1999, p. B14). True, a few child prodigies achieved renown: Mozart, Herbert Spencer, Norbert Wiener. But in general, later fame after a promising start is unlikely. “There is no correlation between status as a prodigy and overall productivity.” Thus, half of the Science Talent Search winners “do not even remain in science through college” (both quotes are from Root-Bernstein, 1999, pp, 461-462). One of the most well-known instances of youthful “burn-out” is the writer Henry Roth (1998). At age 28, in 1934, he wrote a widely acclaimed first novel, “Call It Sleep,” called “brilliant” and “one of the most genuinely distinguished novels written by a 20th-century American” by critics. Yet the novel was followed by “six decades of literary silence” until Roth wrote the first of a six-volume autobiography, which was published in 1994, a year before his death at age 89. Joseph Heller wrote Catch 22 in 1961, followed by 20 years of writer‘s block. Margaret Mitchell never wrote another novel after Gone with the Wind. Readers

Our nature here is not unlike our wine: Some sorts when old continue brisk and fine.

Sir John Denham, Of Old Age