Why do some artists (Delbanco mentions Saul Bellow, James Baldwin and Norman Mailer) mature early and then run out of steam, producing only second-rank work in their last decades, while others gain momentum and occasionally even peak in old age?
She was young, and she had had only a few years of absolutely first-rank work, but that is true of many writers, including some of the greatest.
Some critics regarded him as a second-rank writer, who occasionally produced first-rank works, and felt his plots and writing could be formulaic.
Other collections include: The Aliens Among Us (1969) Monsters and Medics (1977; published by Ballantine Books; includes the novel Second Ending) Futures Past (1982) (includes the Sector General story Spacebird) Paul Kincaid described White as a second-rank writer who occasionally produced first-rank works, and attracted a devoted but not wide audience.
However, systematic studies of his thought (Beierwaltes, Gersh, Moran) have also recognized him as a highly original metaphysician and speculative thinker of the first rank whose work transcends the limitations of his age and mode of expression.
Well, cults often gather around powerful works of the second rank.
While not of the first rank, Coolbrith's work avoided sentimentality, didacticism, and stilted prosody.
It may be hard to conceive of making the claim about a young adult book, but I believe "Octavian Nothing" will someday be recognized as a novel of the first rank, the kind of monumental work Italo Calvino called "encyclopedic" in the way it sweeps up history into a comprehensive and deeply textured pattern.
Besides oils, Israëls worked in watercolours and was an etcher of the first rank.
How does the ranking work?
In the first two studies, GPs ranked working on-call at night as one of the top two most stressful aspects of their work situation [ 11, 12].
