<![CDATA[Great Literature’s Peaks And Valleys]]>Amit Majmudar notices that "the most powerful, permanent 'ages' in literature have actually spanned less than a single writer’s lifetime" and are often only "three or four decades." For instance, the Elizabethan England that gave us Shakespeare or the mid-19th century Russia of Doestoevsky and Tolstoy gave rise to a frenzy of brilliant works in a short period of time:

Talent tends to cluster and crackle on contact—a lot of permanent work gets written by a handful of major writers, all at once, and then things peter off. Now a critic’s tendency here would be to point out something like, hey, the Russian novel didn’t die with Dostoevsky, what about The Death of Ivan Ilych, what about The Master and Margarita, what about this, what about that. I would counter that I’m not saying good or great work doesn’t get written before and after a Peak. The tendency toward the Peak—I dare not say law of—gives us results like any peak in graphed data: We see an upslope and a downslope, and outliers. The tendency, being a tendency, is not without obvious exceptions: Several decades, not just three or four, elapsed between the first play of Aeschylus and the last one of Euripides.

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