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

Purchase

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.

More

The Long Goodbye

By Michael Wood

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

More

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

Map

Rites of Passage

Coming-of-age rituals from around the world.

View

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.

1905 | Vienna

Oral Fixation

Sigmund Freud on thumbsucking as the road to darker pleasures.More

1817 | London

Occupational Hazard

For chimneysweeps, it’s a hard-knock life. More

1898 | London

Young and at Sea

Joseph Conrad sets sail for points eastward.More

Charts & Graphs

Birth Order

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

View

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

Black and white photograph of folksinger Phil Ochs.

Black and white image of English novelist Anthony Trollope.

Color portrait of English philosopher John Locke.

Classical engraving of Aristophanes with a long beard.

A sick child is always the mother’s property; her own feelings generally make it so.

—Jane Austen, 1816

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

Purchase