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A military term referring to a sharp turn made so as to face the opposite direction, as during marching or drilling.

Figuratively, a sudden reversal in one’s position or decision on an issue. “He was a diehard Red Sox fan, but he made a complete about face and roots for the Yankees now.”

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In a legendary reading at the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, 1955.

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That baby face:

Amit Majmudar advances an interesting theory about Rimbaud’s prodigy here.

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This is far from his greatest story, but it’s a fun one, and how many other fiction writers have produced good work this late in the game?

Other masters of longevity:

  • Poet Stanley Kunitz lived to age 100.
  • Poet Richard Wilbur is still going strong at age 93.

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Goethe clearly gets the “Iron Man” award here. He was a young phenom with Young Werther at 24 and an old master at 82. Nearly 60 years of brilliance–give the man a hand.

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I’d argue that Yeats was at the top of his game longer than any other English-language poet. From “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” to his final short lyrics, he turned out great poetry steadily for nearly 50 years–twice as long as Keats lived.

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Milton was no late bloomer–for one thing, he’d published “Lycidas” at 28, as noted above. But Paradise Lost marked such a major turn in his career, and such an incredible pivot into a new genre (writing an epic is very different from writing lyrics or political tracts), that I thought it deserved a mention.

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Ajax may have come earlier, but Antigone is better known.

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It would be the only novel he’d complete in his lifetime (the unfinished Three Days Before the Shooting… was published posthumously), but it was more than enough to secure his reputation.

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The best was yet to come. The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner followed in quick succession, and her masterpiece, Middlemarch (1871-72), appeared when she was in her fifties.

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