Fail first, then fly high

LEAD PIX: Peaking young: English romantic poet Lord Byron was only 26 when, in his own words, 'I awoke one morning and found myself famous'. -- Hulton Archive/Getty Images

So you’ve won the Booker Prize before you’re 30. Now, what about the rest of your career as a writer? One literary critic weighs in on peaking too early.

IN 1956 Samuel Beckett, then 50 years old, wrote to his American publisher about how he viewed his newfound fame, as Waiting For Godot suddenly gave him an audience that had hitherto been ignoring him for decades. “Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me. In fact, I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.”