Some interesting notes: There are about ten times as many 18-year-olds as there are 50-year-olds. Young people are far more likely to write fantasy whereas older people prefer literary fiction and "other" genres.
So here's a question: Does age and development have anything to do with what genre you write or is it society's influence on what you do? Would the same 18-year-olds who write fantasy now want to write literary prose when they're 50? If the 50-year-olds looked back to when they were 18, would they say they would have picked fantasy over literary fiction back then?
What I find interesting is that those who were born in the 1950s who were coming up during a golden age of science fiction and fantasy aren't writing it more.
Though I do think it has something to do with more of an emphasis being placed on the classics when they were going through school whereas now genre fiction has become more of an accepted part of curriculum.
If genre fiction is more acceptable now, it's changed a lot since I've been in high school (and I don't think I'm that much older than 18-year-olds). The only "genre" books I got to read were The Once and Future King and Brave New World.
