In connection with yesterday's federal holiday, New Yorker bloggers Amy Davidson and Hendrik Hertzberg direct our attention to how young Martin Luther King Jr. was on April 4, 1968, the day of his death: 39. We are accustomed to thinking of President Kennedy as "youthful" and as having been gunned down "in the prime of life." Hertzberg points out that had Kennedy, who died at age 46, survived only to King's age, he would be unknown to all Americans except scholars of congressional minutiae and the vice-presidential politics of 1956. And a third victim of assassination, Mohandas Gandhi, wouldn't even be on the radar screen of Jeopardy contestants had he died before reaching 40.
King turned 27 while leading the Montgomery bus boycott. We should all be grateful that he was not a late bloomer.
Switching to another realm of human endeavor, consider the case of John Keats, who, despite dying at age 25, qualifies as one of the six greatest English authors (according to Edmund Wilson*). Shakespeare turned 25 in 1589, which is likely the year that his earliest extant play, I King Henry VI, was composed. John Berryman has an essay in which he imagines Shakespeare taking stock of his career on the morning of his thirtieth birthday: virtually everything he is known for was yet to be done. From the editor's headnote to the section on Keats in The Norton Anthology of English Literature:
No one can read Keats's poems and letters without an undersense of the immense waste of so extraordinary an intellect and genius cut off so early. What he might have accomplished is beyond conjecture; what we do know is that his achievement, when he stopped writing at the age of 24, greatly exceeds that at the corresponding age of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton.
Poems and letters? Yes, and a subject for another post.
*The other five being Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Austen, and Dickens. Wilson stipulates, in hazarding this opinion in a letter to Vladimir Nabokov, that he is excepting Joyce, an Irishman. See page xxi of John Updike's Introduction to Letters on Literature at the preceding link.
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