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.

1837 | London

Poor Stupid Me

Young Victoria is all aflutter on the day she learns she is queen.More

c. 625 BC | Sparta

Trials of Strength

If the child was weakly and deformed, they ordered it to be thrown into a deep cavern.More

1876 | Nice

Paths to Glory

Marie Bashkirtseff’s dramatic teenage diary.More

Charts & Graphs

A list of feral children throughout time.

Abandonment Issues

When feral children rejoin the world.

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Color portrait of English philosopher John Locke.

Sepia colored photo of Oscar Wilde sitting on a rock with a book in his hand

Black and white photograph of former President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt.

Black and white image of English novelist Anthony Trollope.

Painting of humanist and scholar Erasmus.

Black and white photograph of historian and man of letters Henry Adams.

Black and white image of Greek biographer and writer Plutarch.

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

—Mark Twain, 1876

Black and white photograph of English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Black and white photograph of British writer Doris Lessing.

Gerard Manley Hopkins & Doris Lessing

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