Painting of three young children lying in a grassy field.

Arcadia, by Thomas Eakins, c. 1883. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967.

Youth

Volume VII, Number 3 | summer 2014

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The Blue Boy, by Thomas Gainsborough, c. 1770.

Preamble

Fortune’s Child

By Lewis H. Lapham

Youth as glimpsed by its elders is a story that comes from afar, showing itself as either lovely to look at or a torment to endure.

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The Long Goodbye

By Michael Wood

A reconsideration of Gustave Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education—and the very idea of growing up.

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Map showing coming-of-age rituals from around the world.

Map

Rites of Passage

Coming-of-age rituals from around the world.

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Miscellany

Thomas Edison received three months of formal education at the age of eight before his mother homeschooled him. Benjamin Franklin quit school at age ten, Charles Dickens at twelve.

c. 150 | Athens

Beauty and the Beast

Zeus and Ganymede get paternal. More

8 | Tomis

Love at First Sight

Child, what you seek is nowhere to be found, your beloved is lost when you avert your eyes. More

c. 1550 | Shanyin

Sweet and Cold

What a shame that I have carried a boy, as he ate some candy, to his death.More

Charts & Graphs

Birth Order

Well-known youngest, middle, and eldest children—and more.

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Lewis Lapham at his desk

Black and white photograph of British writer Doris Lessing.

Painting of a young Queen Victoria

Black and white photograph of Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson.

Painting of Jean de la Bruyère wearing a red cape.

I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?

—Lord Byron, 1813

Color portrait of English essayist, dramatist, and journalist Richard Steele.

Black and white photograph of social reformer and pacifist Jane Addams.

Richard Steele & Jane Addams

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