Every career has a first note and a final bow. In this series, we look at how writers and musicians introduced themselves to the world and how they chose to say goodbye. From the bold experiments of early work to the quiet reckonings of last acts, these essays trace the full arc of creative lives.
Whether it’s Philip Roth returning to Newark in his final novel or The Beatles closing their story atop a London rooftop, Debuts and Farewells explores what beginnings and endings reveal about the people who made them, and about the time in which they lived.
The Clash had a classic run that was short enough that, if you play it straight through, it almost feels both improbable and necessary that a band this alive burned through itself so quickly. The real problem is that The Clash have at least three endings, and which one you believe in says a lot…
Iris Murdoch has a funny habit of making novels look lighter than they are. At first, you get the pleasures. The odd houses. The romantic confusion. The clever people making terrible emotional decisions with complete confidence. Someone is chasing the wrong person. Someone is philosophizing when they should really be apologizing. Someone is trying to…
Some artists only make full sense once you hear how they end. You can enjoy their early work on its own terms. You can admire the craft, the voice, the attitude. But it’s only after the final album that the opening songs rearrange themselves. Lyrics land differently. Jokes feel sharper. Distance starts to look deliberate…
Some bands arrive fully costumed, waving their arms for attention. Others slip in quietly, almost shyly, as though they’re more interested in building a world than selling one. R.E.M. belongs to that second category, a band whose entrance felt understated and whose exit felt earned. Their first album, Murmur, appeared in 1983 like a coded…
Few artists have treated their career like a story with a beginning and an end. David Bowie did. From his oddball 1967 debut to the haunted, visionary Blackstar nearly fifty years later, Bowie wrote chapters in an autobiography disguised as art. Each reinvention was a clue, each mask another way to show the truth. Looking…
Few writers have entered and exited literature as deliberately as Philip Roth. His debut, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), made him a National Book Award winner at just 26. His farewell novel, Nemesis (2010), marked not only the end of a remarkable career but also a conscious decision to put down the pen for good. Looking at…
When a band begins, they rarely imagine the ending. Yet when the Beatles released their debut, Please Please Me, in March 1963, the seeds of everything that would follow — the screaming crowds, the experimentation, the cultural upheaval — were already there. And when they bowed out with Abbey Road in September 1969, they gave…