In Ancient Greece, Euripides and Plato wrote about old age and death. In "The Republic", Socrates says he likes to listen to old people because they have traveled the road we must travel and know, "what it is like, easy or difficult, rough or smooth."
In "Oedipus at Colonus," a play by Sophocles, the blind Oedipus displays a foibles of aging by refusing to admit wrongdoing. When Oedipus trespasses holy ground, he agrees to perform purification rituals, but never apologizes to the gods. Later, he blames his sons for not having prevented his exile long ago, although he himself had chosen that punishment. In these and other ways, Sophocles portrays the aging as increasingly religious, less willing to accept responsibility for their misdeeds, and prone to rewriting their own biographies. Towards the end of the play, Oedipus' daughter Antigone sympathizes with her dead relatives rather than the living, and for that Sophocles sentences her to imprisonment inside a grave. Both symbolically and overtly, Sophocles thereby warns against being more attached to the dead than the living.
Not only the ancients, but Cicero, Shakespeare, Chaucer and countless writers in between have been occupied with death and aging. Modern writers keep that tradition alive. One of the greatest modern works on such themes is Virginia Woolfe's "Mrs. Dalloway" (1925). The book takes place in the space of a single day in which the aging characters, living beneath the recurring clangs of London's Big Ben clock, each respond differently to thoughts of their own mortality. Some, like Clarissa, accept it as a blissful respite from a harsh life, while others, such as the panicked Peter Walsh, seek distraction from the inevitable conclusion. Along the way, the characters also debate the pros and cons of aging. “The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent's Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this: that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one had gained―at last!--the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence―the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.”
Looking back over the past 50 years, there have been major works on aging and dying which stand under an especially luminous beam. The 1962 Latin American classic, “The Death of Artemio Cruz” by Carlos Fuentes, deals with an old man on his deathbed recalling his selfish choices, while "The Diary of a Mad Old Man” (1965) by the great Japanese author Junichiro Tanizaki, details an elderly mans daily musings on sex and death. The 1971 National Book Award went to Saul Bellow for “Mr. Sammler's Planet,” a work about a septuagenarian Holocaust survivor reflecting on his life and times. Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing's “The Summer Before the Dark” (1973) is about a wife and mother whose kids have moved out and who must now face the fact that she has repressed her true self, becoming a satellite to her husband. Kingsley Amis's black comedy, “Ending Up” (1974), sets five forgetful elderly folks in a London home. The 1984 historical novel "Cold Sassy Tree" by Olive burns is about an old man who marries a young woman after his wife dies. Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez pondered a similar theme in “Love in the Time of Cholera” (1985). Wallace Stegner's “Crossing to Safety” (1987) is a book about two Depression-era couples, one rich one poor, who remain friends into old age. Yet another Nobel winner, J.M. Coetzee, won the 1999 Booker Prize for “Disgrace”. The book's about a 52-year old man facing an identity crisis. On one hand, he can't attract young women he's still attracted to, and on the other hand, his daughter has begun to take care of him, rather than vice versa.
Phillip Roth is widely regarded as one of the greatest living authors and has won most of the big awards at least once. A number of his books deal with aging and death. In "Sabbath's Theater," (1995) the aging Roth questions whether, with death approaching, he can remain creative (his records seems to answer in the affirmative. "The Dying Animal" (2001) continues exploring this theme. In this work, David Kepesh's affair with a young girl makes him jealous and paranoid, forcing him to reassess his life philosophy. More recently, "Everyman" (2006) examines disease, mortality, and dying. The book starts with a main character who is already dead and whose past the reader learns about through the memories of those who knew him well. Although an atheist, the protagonist pleas for absolution. Looking past his long-descent towards death, countless medical procedures, and the loss of his friends and lovers, he recalls an idealized version of childhood.