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OMG. Poets. Think about it; poetry is the SHORTEST of the styles. Playwrights only live a little longer---and plays are LONGER than poems, but SHORTER than novels! Novelists live a few years longer, because they write longer work! It only makes sense, right? Nonfiction writers . . . must live longer than fiction writers because creativity drains you.

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There is no mystery here. The guy doing the study noted that very few people can become accomplished novelists, let alone non-fiction writers, without living to a fairly ripe age.

The history of literature is full of promising writers that died young, yea, even the 'history' (such as it is) of SF. In SF the guys that died young were mostly known for short stories...because those form the main body of their works.

I would backform Rahl's statement, the reason this effect appears is because we don't consider novelists and all other writers as poets. OSC still writes poetry. I personally stopped writing formal poetry when I was...when I stopped getting assignments to write poems, I guess. I suppose it still happens every now and again.

But for various reasons that have a lot to do with our ingrained responses to literature, we prefer reading poems by the young and non-fiction by the old. When a great novelist or biographer/historian/whatever dies young, the great novel or encyclopedia or whatever doesn't get written. As the man said.

By the way, you can read the first three or four books set in the Wheel of Time series as individual books, with individual storylines and individual dramatic closures. It's really only with the last few books that he's committed the sin of "let's go for another 7-8 hundred pages and then call it a book even though I introduce no dramatic resolution of any kind." Really, the first three books (it is at the end of the third book that Rand and the rest of the world both find out for sure that he is really the Dragon Reborn) work just fine as three self contained books and as a self contained trilogy.