When he was still a university student, he published his first volume of poetry.

NEWYORKER: The Escape Artist

He might have done better simply to write a sequel to his first volume.

FORBES: Leadership Lessons from the Mob and Mother Teresa

Kenneth Widmerpool is present from his emergence in the first volume out of the mist on a school run to his bizarre death in the last volume.

ECONOMIST: Anthony Powell

Paolini was only eighteen when the first volume of his Eragon series, the tale of the dragon rider Eragon, was privately published, in 2001.

NEWYORKER: The Dragon��s Egg

Ms Harman's is the first biography of Stevenson since an eight-volume edition of his collected letters was published by Yale University Press in 1994-96.

ECONOMIST: A man who, by turns, was seductive and infuriating

Chaikin is a quant from way back, using the first wave of PCs in the 1980s to hone his analyses of stock price and volume patterns on Wall Street.

FORBES: Separating Chumps From Champs In Retail, Banks And Tech

Thorp may have been the first to discover that Madoff could not have been hedging his customers accounts because the actual reported volume of trading in stock options was a small fraction of the trades that he alone was claiming.

FORBES: The Card Sharp Who Cottoned Onto Madoff's Fraud In 1991