A portrait of the artist as a young or old innovator: measuring the careers of modern novelists

William Faulkner believed that “there’s a period in a writer’s life when he is … for lack of any other word, fertile, and he just produces … [T]here’s a time in his life, one matchless time … The speed, and the power and the talent, they’re all there and then … he’s ‘hot’ – which of course can’t last forever.”1 When he was asked whether this period came early or late in a writer’s life, Faulkner responded “that’s something you can’t say. Some write best when they are young, write themselves out. Some never reach their top speed until late in life. That’s – you just can’t say.”2