Fast Fiction

A recently released report says that poets die young. James Kaufman of the Learning Research Institute at California State University at San Bernardino compiled this report for the Journal of Death Studies (didja know there was such a thing?), Kaufman studied 1,987 dead writers from various centuries from the United States, China, Turkey and Eastern Europe and came up with the following breakdown:

Poets: 62 years
Playwrights: 63 years
Novelists: 66 years
Non-Fiction Writers: 68 years

What I find curious about this study (and I haven’t read it, because my issue of the Journal of Death Studies seems to be lost in the mail) is that it covers hundreds of years of data ... let’s face it, poets are not what they used to be. It also seems that the study sampled known or possibly well-known professionals (maybe folks that biographers would have bothered to follow for their whole lives). Poets do tend to get well known earlier, because building a body of work does not take as long as novelists or playwrights (this is just guessing on my part). I can name five poets off the top of my head that died in WW I and not one playwright.

I don’t know, I think a bit more work could have been done on this sample to adjust for longevity during the writer’s lifetime. If you’re gonna count someone like Emily Dickinson then I think you need to take into account the average lifespan in 1886 would have been about 68-70 and she died at 56. Robert Frost lived to 89 and died at a time the average lifespan in North America was about 73.

And cause of death ... serving in the armed forces, epidemics, suicide, auto accidents, natural causes ... I need more info. Are poets more prone to drowning or suicide? These are the interesting stats I need to see broken out. Especially since it seems that playwrights fare little better than poets. Maybe I’ll become a journalist.