age 74, and went on to great praise. A possibly more well-known example might be Laura Ingalls Wilder. She became a columnist in her forties, but did not publish her first novel in the Little House series of children's books until her sixties. Charles Bukowski wrote his first novel in 1971, when he was 51 years old. Memoirist and novelist Flora Thompson was first published in her thirties but is most famous for the semi-autobiographical Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy, the first volume of which was published when she was 63. Frank McCourt didn't publish his first book Angela's Ashes, which he later won the Pulitzer Prize for, until he was 66. Children's author Mary Alice Fontenot wrote her first book at 51 and wrote almost thirty additional books, publishing multiple volumes in her eighties and nineties. Kenneth Grahame was born in 1859 and joined the Bank of England in 1879, rising through the ranks to become its secretary. Although he had written various short stories while working at the bank, it was only after his retirement in 1908 that he published his masterpiece and final work The Wind in the Willows. Penelope Fitzgerald launched her literary career in 1975, at the age of 58, when she published a biography of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. She won the Booker Prize for 1979 with Offshore, and in 2012, The Observer named her final novel, The Blue Flower, as one of "the ten best historical novels". Richard Adams's first novel, the bestseller Watership Down, was published when he was in his fifties. The Marquis de Sade published his first novel, Justine, after turning 51. Raymond Chandler published his first short story at 45, and his first novel, The Big Sleep, at 51. Paul Torday published his debut novel Salmon Fishing in the Yemen at the age of 59, after a career in the engineering industry. Jean Rhys is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which was published in October 1966, when she was 76. Aron Ettore Schmitz published his first novel Senilità in his 38th year; however it was not until he published Zeno's Conscience that he made a breakthrough, aged 61. Even this was self-published. In other areas of writing, historian Gerda Lerner, born in 1920, published her first book, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina, in 1967, when she was either 47 or 46 depending on her