What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

(EDIT: removed a couple of false positives based on comments from people)

This is Witold.

The other day we were discussing with Andrew if there are major works in fiction published by authors over age of 85. [A few years ago I wrote a post, “What’s the best novel ever written by an 85-year-old?. — AG]

Thomas Pynchon is 88 and published a new novel a few months back. I’m yet to read it, but I understand the consensus is that it’s far from his best. (Then again, people have been saying that about Pynchon for a long time, so maybe age has nothing to do with it.)

In trying to come up with some good examples I asked LLMs. Turns out that Sophocles lived into his 90s and at least two plays can be dated to his last few years. One of them is Philoctetes. And Goethe finished Faust at 82. Anyway, other than that I did not see a great LLM suggestion. So I tried to cast the net more broadly and asked LLMs to compile list of 10-20 writers considered canon in each decade since 1800, then identify all their notable works and years of publication. After some iterations with coding agents I got over 2,000 works by 200 authors.

It looks something like this:

They are definitely getting older with time (side question for another time: can all of the increase here be explained simply by gains in life expectancy?), but there are few points above 80.

When I checked closely, these points turned out to be mostly minor works. (EDIT: also hunted down several mistakes, as one would expect from LLMs; thanks to commenters.) Still, you can see some traces in the graph for Jules Verne, Lev Tolstoy, and Jose Saramago. Borges wrote “Shakespeare’s Memory”, a great short story—albeit you can say not very innovative—at 90.

(Also interestingly, the trend in that graph keeps going up in recent years… but it looks to me like this is driven by lack of major works from young authors. It may be how my sample is constructed.)

Since I wasn’t seeing any titles that could be considered canon, I asked LLM to narrow my dataset to major works only:

There were so few above age of *sixty-five *that you can just write them down:

1874 – V. Hugo Ninety-three (72)

1947 – T. Mann Doctor Faustus (72)

1957 – B. Pasternak Doctor Zhivago (67)

1962 – K. A. Porter Ship of Fools (72)

1995 – J. Saramago Blindness (73)

2005 – C. McCarthy No Country for Old Men (72)

2006 – C. McCarthy The Road (73)

2020 – H. Mantel The Mirror and the Light (68)

I’ve read Mantel, McCarthy and Saramago from this list. “Ship of Fools” I’ve never even heard of. They’re probably great novels, but the list tops out at 73! That’s quite stark!

And it’s such a short list, too. Sure, it is very incomplete, because I started from a kind of “balanced” panel over time, not a list of all major writers… But I couldn’t think of any further additions! Asking chatbots for suggestions I’ve learned that Saul Bellow, Doris Lessing, and Don DeLillo kept writing into their 80s, but are they good books? I haven’t read them. People should put their contenders in comments.