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Annie Proulx
Born
Annie Proulx spent years as a freelance journalist writing how-to guides on cider making and gardening before publishing her first novel, Postcards, in 1992 at 56. The Shipping News followed in 1993 and won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and her story Brokeback Mountain appeared in 1997. Her practical, rural knowledge from those journalism years runs through the fiction.
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Nelson Mandela
Born
Nelson Mandela was released in 1990, aged 71, after 27 years in prison, and led the African National Congress through negotiations that ended apartheid. He became South Africa's first democratically elected president in 1994, at 75, and served one term, focusing on reconciliation. His earlier activism made him a symbol; the work of these late years made the transition happen.
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Frank McCourt
Born
Frank McCourt taught English in New York public schools for about thirty years, then published Angela's Ashes, his memoir of a Limerick childhood in poverty, in 1996 at 66. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was followed by 'Tis and Teacher Man. The storytelling he had honed in front of classrooms gave the book its voice, and its success encouraged a boom in memoir writing.
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Louise Bourgeois
Born
Louise Bourgeois worked for decades with modest recognition before a 1982 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, when she was 70. Her most celebrated works followed: the room-sized Cells of the 1990s and the giant spider Maman, made in 1999 when she was 87 for Tate Modern's opening exhibition. She kept making art until her death at 98, and the late work defines her reputation.
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