Classic Coming-of-Age Literature
From a certain perspective, every great work of literature is in some sense a coming-of-age tale. Hamlet's crisis is to enter into full individuality, free from the constraints of his dead father and his "lustful" mother; Jay Gatsby's dilemma is his inability to move beyond a certain fixed point in his youth, his first infatuation with Daisy Fay; Milton's imaginative re-telling of Adam and Eve is a chronicle of how they rebel, in rather childish manner, against the instructions of their Father. Put differently, every great work of literature turns upon conflict, and how we respond to conflict determines how well we come of age.
But certain works of literature clearly have as their very center the coming-of-age question. These works often focus on the development of a young hero or heroine, or they show the relations between child and parent, or they trace a character's present crisis to a moment in the past when coming-of-age was either prevented or thwarted. The following lists present a number of such classic coming-of-age works, many of which have featured prominently in past versions of this Coming of Age course.
There are four categories: Boy Stories, Girl Stories, Drama, and Poetry. The Boy and Girl Stories are hardly meant to be exclusive: boys have much to learn from the examples of Jane Eyre or Jo March; and girls are as able as boys to follow the patterns of, say, Joyce's Stephen Dedalus (as Virginia Woolf makes clear in To The Lighthouse).