What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures

Gladwell draws a distinction between two types of genius: the precocious and the late blooming. As a culture, we are enamored with stories of precocious geniuses like Picasso and Jonathan Safran Foer who find their ideas fully formed from a young age and do not engage in conscious experiments or research. There is a misconception that all creatively talented individuals are precocious, whereas in fact works of genius can be created at any age. For example, economist David Galenson discovered that the poets from 47 poetry anthologies published since 1980 were of all different ages at the time they wrote the anthologized works, meaning that there is no evidence for the theory that lyric poetry is the province of youth. Moreover, artists like the French painter Cézanne, who floundered in his youth because of his lack of proficiency as a draftsman, found that the paintings from his mid-60s were worth 15 times more than those of his 20s. The opposite was true of Picasso. Cézanne was therefore a late bloomer—and the type of genius that our society has forgotten to study. Gladwell also looks at Ben Fountain, a PEN award–winning writer who didn’t find creative success until his late forties, after he spent years eking out time to write from his career in law and real estate and traveled to Haiti several times to research his stories.