Success Comes Better Late Than Never

Sun., June 30, 1996

Carolyn Nizzi Warmbold The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Late Bloomers”

By Brendan Gill (Artisan, $14.95)

Baby boomers who have not achieved fame, fortune or fulfillment may live to flower still. Brendan Gill’s “Late Bloomers” (Artisan, $14.95) pertly chronicles the lives of 74 people who weren’t much successful till later in life. Consider:

Montaigne invented the essay form in his 40s.

Julia Child whipped up her first TV omelet in her 50s.

Jonathan Swift didn’t gain fame for “Gulliver’s Travels” till he was nearly 60.

Grandma Moses took up painting in her 70s.

Art dealer Leo Castelli married for a third time in his 80s.

“Late,” for Gill, is relative - from 40 on. But he is specific about “blooming”: It is “the moment in time at which we discover … some worthy means of fulfilling ourselves.” His subjects didn’t produce major work till middle age (Edith Wharton) or changed careers late in life (Harry Truman), or worked for decades only to find recognition near the end (Romare Bearden).

Two Georgians are recognized: Richard Robert Wright, born a slave in Dalton in 1853 and later a banker in his 60s; and Margot Gayle, who set out to preserve New York architecture in middle age.

Gill, who has amused New Yorker readers for 60 years, never lets the prose cloy. Col. Sanders is “the public embodiment of his succulent brainchild”; classical scholar Edith Hamilton “was not least Greek in being lesbian”; Betty Furness “was pretty and wholesome-looking and fatally lacked allure.”

“Late Bloomers” does not.

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