Still Got It: Authors Who Thrive as Super Agers
Does Writing Keep You Young? Neuroscience Gives It a Solid Maybe
There are two fascinating details in the recent Guardian profile of Stewart Brand, one hanging up in the top third of the piece, the other settled down near the bottom. The first goes back to something I covered in my review of Brand’s new book, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One. It’s there in the subtitle: Brand sees this as the first in a series.
“It is”—to be specific—“the first of a planned 13 installments,” says the Guardian. Thirteen! I haven’t seen that number reported anywhere else. Still, even five or six volumes would be remarkably ambitious. But it’s all the more so when arriving at the second detail near the end of the piece: Though he suffers from a progressive, terminal respiratory illness, Brand is undertaking this massive project at 87 years old.
“I’d be very surprised by making it into my 90s,” he says. “Imagine the luck, to get to be 87—it’s just fantastic!”
George Orwell died relatively young (tuberculosis), but he had theory that kept him going while writing 1984; he thought he wouldn’t die as long as he had a book to scribble. Call it Orwell’s Gambit. Didn’t work for him, though the theory seems to hold for many others. Brand is a rare bird, but once you start looking for them, they’re more plentiful than you might imagine, certainly more than I assumed: authors who keep plugging away into extreme old age.
Enter the Super Agers
A few years ago, AARP published a feature on so-called “super agers”—that is, people whose memory is as spry past 80 as it is in far more youthful peers. Their lead example? Legendary Nobel winning economist Vernon L. Smith. “You can find Vernon Smith hard at work at his computer by 7:30 each morning, cranking out 10 solid hours of writing and researching every day,” writes Jeanne Dorin McDowell, adding:
His job is incredibly demanding—he is currently on the faculty of both the business and law schools at Chapman University. But the hard work pays off: Smith’s research is consistently ranked as the most-cited work produced at the school—a testament to his ongoing academic influence and success. He manages his job and research work while also coauthoring books and traveling around the country to deliver lectures.
Smith was a mere 75 when he won his Nobel, just a wee lad. He was 96 when AARP told his story. He’s now 99 and only last year published his most recent book, Adam Smith’s Theory of Society, two months before receiving the Acton Institute’s Faith & Freedom Award.
Then there’s philosopher Charles Taylor, age 94. I plowed through A Secular Age—twice, to ensure I understood what I’d read—and his Sources of the Self sits on the shelf, staring down at me accusingly for not having finished it. A few books like that would be an ample contribution for most. But no. Taylor’s written or cowritten something like thirty-six books over his career, and he’s still going at it.
Taylor cowrote Reconstructing Democracy in 2020 and published his most recent book in 2024—Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment—when he was 92! (I’ll wear out my exclamation key if I keep that up through this whole piece, so please just mentally insert the mark yourself going forward.)
Prize-winning novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick, 97, published her most recent novella, Antiquities, in 2021 at age 93. “Exquisite,” “breathtaking,” and “elegant”: all adjectives employed by such outlets as the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Lionel Shriver dissented. When she reviewed it for the New York Times, Shriver called it “odd” and “obscure,” finding fault with the narrator and the point of the book itself. In her closing paragraph, she highlighted Ozick’s age:
At 93, Ozick can still craft a beautiful sentence, which is more than many a younger writer can boast; if I’m spooling out prose this graceful in 2050, I’ll kiss the floor. So I hope I haven’t sounded unkind. But Cynthia Ozick is a pro. Whatever her age, she can take it.
She could. In the kind of exchange that makes literary society a joy to observe, Ozick dished a dis in the form of a poem. Here’s the opening stanza:
Lionel Shriver,
no deep-diver:
depth an indictment,
longevity an excitement—
Oh look, the writer’s so old!
Still, as Shriver also said at the first mention of Ozick’s age (there are two in the piece), “Retirement is for pikers.” True. Pulitzer Prize-winner and literary nonfiction wizard John McPhee, 94, proves the point. He’s still writing for the New Yorker and published his most recent book, Tabula Rasa: Volume 1, just three years ago.
Then there’s Robert Caro—and by the way, this would be a great place to insert one of those implied exclamation points if you didn’t take the hint earlier. Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, and a National Humanities Medal, Caro’s all of 90 and still hard at work on the final installment of his five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson.
Caro has outlived his editor, the legendary Robert Gottlieb (also possessed of a work-till-you-drop ethic) who died at 92 still waiting for Caro to finish. He’s now outlived nearly all of his principal sources. No rush. He started volume one in 1975. Caro writes everything longhand on legal pads before typing up his pages on a Smith Corona. He’d never even heard of a Google Doc until 2024.
I could continue to multiply examples; instead, let me just list several more of these titans by descending current age, along with their last published book.
Diane Johnson, 91. Lorna Mott Comes Home (2021).
Don DeLillo, 89. The Silence (2020).
Robert Louis Wilken, 89. Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (2019).
Thomas Pynchon, 88. Shadow Ticket (2025).
Jerome Charyn, 88. Sergeant Salinger (2021).
Joyce Carol Oates, 87. Fox (2025).
Margaret Atwood, 86. Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (2025).
Isabel Allende, 83. My Name Is Emilia del Valle (2025).
Joseph Stiglitz, 82. The Origins of Inequality (2025).
Marilynne Robinson, 82. Reading Genesis (2024).
And the baby of the bunch:
Simon Schama, 80. Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations (2023).
There are, of course, many more. But why beat a thriving horse? What’s fascinating is to contemplate what’s buzzing inside these super agers’ brains. How do they do it?
Building Cognitive Reserve
They’re bucking the trend. The typical trajectory for a human brain sees memory reach its peak at 40. “Overall brain volume begins to atrophy in our 50s, particularly in the areas of the brain linked to complex thought processes and learning,” writes McDowell.1 “Changing hormones, deteriorating blood vessels and difficulty managing blood glucose—the brain’s primary fuel—lead us toward the cognitive decline associated with aging.”
Rifling through the memory for desired words, holding onto new information—it all gets harder as the years pile on. Unless you’re a super ager. Researchers who study them note their brains don’t deteriorate at the typical rate. Regions of the brain responsible for emotion, memory, and information processing remain as robust as the brains of those decades younger.
Several factors contribute to this mental vitality. Genetics is the most obvious—if you got it, you got it—but the magic seems to involve a mix of lifestyle choices. Super agers display four common habits, according to McDowell:
they stay physically and intellectually active;
they continue to challenge themselves;
they remain socially active; and
they curb their indulgences—they’re not, for instance, heavy drinkers.
That could all look like a million things, but let’s focus on intellectual activity and personal challenge, which relates especially well to writers. Based on her research on super agers at Massachusetts General Hospital, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett says the best advice boils down to four words: “work hard at something.” Strenuous mental effort represents a big part of the ticket. How strenuous? Sudoku and online brain games won’t cut it, she says.
Exercising the necessary areas of the brain is tough. “When they increase in activity,” says Barrett, “you tend to feel pretty bad—tired, stymied, frustrated. . . . Hard work makes you feel bad in the moment.” But that’s exactly how you know you’re doing it right. “You must expend enough effort that you feel some ‘yuck.’ Do it till it hurts, and then a bit more.”
There’s a reason this works. Neuroscientists highlight a concept called cognitive reserve: brains shaped by decades of demanding intellectual work develop alternative neural pathways conveniently available when the primary routes start to fail. Learning builds cognitive reserve, so does complex work. And if writing books for fifty or sixty years doesn’t qualify as complex work, nothing does.
Writing draws on nearly everything the brain can do: planning and structuring across hundreds of pages, holding themes and sentences in mind while composing new ones, retrieving vocabulary and knowledge with precision, managing the frustration and self-doubt that come with the work, and imagining how a reader will receive what you’ve written. It’s hard to think of another sustained activity that exercises so many cognitive functions at once—or potentially generates so much of Barrett’s yuck.
And so we get Vernon Smith, sitting down at his desk before his colleagues arrive, researching and writing for ten straight hours; Robert Caro, rewriting the same pages in longhand three or four times before he’s satisfied with the work; Cynthia Ozick, not only writing yet another novella but putting her critics in their place with retaliatory rhyming verse; and Stewart Brand, peering over the horizon of his 90s and planning a multi-volume series. More exclamation marks? Obviously.
Staying in the Game
Am I overstating the science? The open question in all the super-aging research is directionality. Does the work preserve the brain, or do abnormally robust brains enable the work? No one knows for sure, not yet. And there’s undoubtedly some survivor’s bias baked into the whole question. But based on the known lifestyle factors, it appears writing into old age is more than the result of cognitive vitality; it probably serves it too.
I suspect Orwell’s Gambit would have paid off for him if tuberculosis hadn’t claimed his life long before cognitive decline would have become an issue. Many others have employed the move and maintained their edge all the way till the end.2 William F. Buckley Jr. published his final novel, The Rake, a year before his death in 2008 at 82. He famously died at his desk working on two final books, Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater and The Reagan I Knew, both published posthumously the same year. Donald Hall was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States in 2006 at 77. In 2014, he published Essays after Eighty and in 2018 A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, which was released just 17 days after his death at 89. Both are exquisite volumes.
The gambit doesn’t guarantee victory, but it might keep you in the game till the whistle blows. We can all hope as much—if not for ourselves, then at least for Stewart Brand. He’s got a lot of books to write.
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Of course, the final chapter always comes eventually. For your edification, here’s a very partial list of authors who played Orwell’s Gambit to the bitter (or blessed?) end.
Jacques Barzun (1907–2012), died at age 104 and published From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life at 92.
Herman Wouk (1915–2019), died at age 103 and published The Lawgiver at 97 and Sailor and Fiddler at 100.
Bernard Lewis (1916–2018), died at age 101 and published The End of Modern History in the Middle East at 95.
Diana Athill (1917–2019), died at age 101 and published Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter at 98.
Henry Kissinger (1923–2023), died at age 100 and published Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy at 99.
Jane Gardam (1928–2025), died at age 96 and published the final volume of her Old Filth Trilogy, Last Friends, at 85.
Doris Lessing (1919–2013), died at age 94 and published Alfred and Emily at 88.
Edna O’Brien (1930–2024), died at age 93 and published Girl at 88.
Alice Munro (1931–2024), died at age 92 and published Dear Life at 81.
E.O. Wilson (1929–2021), died at age 92 and published Tales from the Ant World at 91.
James Salter (1925–2015), died at age 90 and published his final novel All That Is at 87.
Saul Bellow (1915–2005), died at age 89 and published Ravelstein at 85.
Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023), died at age 89 and published The Passenger and Stella Maris at 89.
Mario Vargas Llosa (1936–2025), died at age 89 and published Le dedico mi silencio (I Give You My Silence) at 87.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018), died at age 88 and published No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters at 88.
Toni Morrison (1931–2019), died at age 88 and published God Help the Child at 84.
Rodney Stark (1934–2022), died at age 88 and published Why God? Explaining Religious Phenomena at 83.
Günter Grass (1927–2015), died at age 87 and published Vonne Endlichkait (Of All That Ends) at 87.
Gore Vidal (1925–2012), died at age 86 and published Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir at 81.
Umberto Eco (1932–2016), died at age 84 and published Numero Zero at 83.
So thoughtful and thought provoking. Thank you
Great and inspiring piece, thank you. You should chat to Henry Oliver about as his book Second Act explores Late Bloomers who flourish later in life, and continue to do their best work long into their later years. Petition for a podcast interview or shared post?