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Comment by saithound | Hacker News Reader

This piece seriously misrepresents Vonnegut's career just to make a dubious point.

Sure, Slaughterhouse Five was Vonnegut's big financial breakthrough, but by that time he was a very well-known writer with several classics, including Player Piano and Harrison Bergeron, and a Guggenheim Fellow, and made a decent living from writing full time. Not glamorous for sure, but in line with most very good writerd.

Far from demonstrating the author's thesis that "failure can ripen into art", his story is the story of a man that had no notable failures in writingy, who consistently produced great work, and continued to do so until he made it big.

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He got the guggenheim fellowship in 1967 when he was 45, only a couple years after he had considered giving up.

I don't see how what you're saying is at odds with the author. At no point did they say Vonnegut was a failure before Slaughthouse Five. Only that he, like many others, didn't produce their opus until later in life. This isn't just limited to writing. There are examples in all fields if you look, both creative and commercial. This idea is definitely at odds with a lot of current SV rhetoric.

Your point, that many people don't produce their magnun opus until later in life, is definitely at odds with a lot of current SV rhetoric. And it's a good point.

If the article had tried to make your point, it would have been a much better article.

Instead, it made a different, much less true point, and had to contort Vonnegut's biography to make it.

"His career looked like a sequence of failures until it suddenly wasn't" is just not true of Vonnegut, not true of Galilei, not true of any of the other "examples in all fields" cites in the article. All of them are people who consistently produced great work from early on, well before their 40s, and then produced a magnum opus that really stood the test of time.

Well just a few years before the breakthrough, he was broke and considering giving up so not entirely misleading IMO.

I think you need some luck to have picked something early in life to be passionate about that will allow you too be great at something later on.

If you were unfortunate enough to be passionate about something physical like a sport or game, not much to look forward to

> If you were unfortunate enough to be passionate about something physical like a sport or game, not much to look forward to

Coach Little League. Physical passions can be a lot more fullfiling than otherwise

You still need to be good enough to be someone people want to be coached by. In the niches I'm familiar that's hard.

Passion can be its own reward. People run into their 90s, it is obviously rewarding even if not “great.”

Also Kurt himself wrote he had always been trying to write about Dresden but failed to do, obviously until said novel. So this article is very spot on on that matter as well — maturity can achieve something that precociousness can’t. So your accusation is kinda missing the point.

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