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In the summer garden, a late bloomer is often the plant not getting quite enough sun.  Its leaves are green and healthy and it may even have its buds set--but it seems to be waiting.  Just as the summer blooming season begins to wind down, the plant pops its first bloom, than another and another, each blossom more beautiful than the first...it blooms well into the fall and often even after a light frost.  In the field of writing, a late bloomer is one whose writing career flowers later than usual.  The late bloomers featured here are strong,  resilient people whose vibrant talent and energy will encourage you to have faith in yourself, your abilities and your dreams regardless of age! With the graying of the Baby Boomers, more and more second careers are being built upon early creative dreams of writing, painting, sculpturing, designing.  Late Bloomerism in the arts may well become a creative norm!  If you've been hanging back, thinking the parade has passed you by...think again!

So, what's in a number...  

bulletMary O'Hara was 56 when she wrote My Friend Flicka.
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At age 57, Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty.

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Agatha Christie wrote The Mousetrap, the world's longest running play when she was 62.

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Laura Ingalls Wilder published Little House in the Big Woods, the first of the eight-volume Little House on the Prairie series at age 65.

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Nikos Kazantzakis was 66 when he wrote Zorba the Greek. 

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E.B. White wrote his classic The Trumpet of the Swan when he was 70.

bulletBetty Friedan was 72 when she wrote The Fountain of Age.
bulletGrandma Moses decided at age 78 to get serious about painting.
bulletAfter a lifetime of acting, 80-year-old Jessica Tandy won her first Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Driving Miss Daisy.
bulletSudden fame overtook 88-year-old Helen Hooven Santmyer for her surprise bestseller, ...And Ladies of the Club.

"No matter how old you are or what circumstances you're coping with in your life, if you're still able to carry that special dream close to your heart, it's still possible for you to reach for it. Of the thousands of writers sprinkled across Planet Earth, I seemed the most unlikely to ever see my work in print when I began writing in earnest in 1990.  Yet I now have three published novels!  So, just get out of your own way and start doing whatever it is you always wanted to do!  What do you have to lose?                                                                                                                                                    ...Kezi Matthews

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