At what stage of their careers do great artists produce their most important work? In a series of studies that bring new insights and new dimensions to the study of artistic creativity, David Galenson's new book examines the careers of more than one hundred modern painters, poets and novelists, to reveal a powerful relationship between age and artistic creativity. Analyzing the careers of major literary and artistic figures, such as Cezanne, van Gogh, Dickens, Hemingway and Plath, Galenson highlights the very different methods by which artists have made innovations. Remarkably, each method is associated with a distinctive pattern of discovery over the life cycle. The book's use of simple but powerful quantitative analysis, permits systematic generalization about large numbers of artists. Pointing to a new and richer history of the modern arts, this book will be of interest not only to humanists and social scientists, but to anyone interested in the nature of human creativity in general.