When Did Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature Make Their Best Work?

__Abstract__ An analysis of 189 highest prices works by modern arts painters (who have deceased) in Franses (2013 ) revealed that, on average, the painters were 41.92 years old when they created their most important work. Moreover, they apparently created this work at 0.6198 of their life, a fraction that is very close to the divine proportion of 0.6180. In this comment, I extend that analysis to see if these results also hold for other creative individuals. It is important that they should have made their work on their own and that there should be a consensus on the most important work. It seems that the list of Nobel Prize laureates in literature makes up a useful list. An analysis of the texts at www.nobelprize.org, and adding information by a Google search, resulted in the database in the Appendix. This database has never been compiled before. The data concern 90 deceased authors, their year of birth, the year of their decease, their best work, and the year in which they created that best work. When the work was created during a range of years, the end year is taken as the peak year. For one author (Karlfeldt), the most important work appeared posthumously, so the subsequent analysis concerns 89 authors.

• View at Publisher
• View at Scopus