Great Artists - King and Springsteen

I've been reading some pretty heavy stuff lately. Titan (Ron Chernow), The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver), The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison) and both Maus books (Art Spiegelman. I read the last three because some folks in my town want to make it harder to read those books. But this post is not about that.

Looking for a change of pace I picked up The Dead Zone by Stephen King on the sale shelf at my local library for a dollar. It's an old paperback from 1980. I've read a lot of Stephen King over the years. I always though the movie adaptation of the book, starring Christopher Walken, was one of the best Stephen King movies. There have been some stinkers. The is a fast, fun read with much more detail than the movie. For sheer terror, you can't beat Pet Sematary, but this is a great story. More supernatural than terror. Plus, Greg Stillson is one of the realest, baddest bad guys in all the King books.

But that's not why I am writing this either.

At the very back of the book is a list of 25 or 30 other bestsellers from the publisher. 40+ years later I think I've heard of two of the authors and one of the books (Eye of the Needle, by Ken Follett. It goes to show you how good you have to be to truly excel in a field over the course of multiple decades. And how rare it is.

Stephen King has done it. Bruce Springsteen too. On Jeopardy a few months back he was the answer to the Final Jeopardy question “A new studio album in 2020 gave him a Top 5 album in 6 consecutive decades, his first in 1975.”?Interestingly, Springsteen published an excellent autobiography (Born to Run, what else) a few years back, and Stephen King plays guitar in a band (The Rock Bottom Remainders).

What are other examples? What artist is getting started or early in their career now that we will be talking about in 2050?