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.

Essay

The Long Goodbye

By Michael Wood

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

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

Map

Rites of Passage

Coming-of-age rituals from around the world.

View

Miscellany

The critic Vladimir Stassov recalled that when the composers Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Modest Mussorgsky “were still young men living together in one room…The piano could be heard, and the singing would start, and with great excitement and bustle they would show me what they had composed the previous day, or the day before or the day before that—how wonderful it was."