Novels about growing up have long been loved by ordinary readers and analyzed, sometimes with more heat than light, by scholars. This book respects the interests of ordinary readers while clarifying and frequently resolving the moral, psychological, social, and occasionally religious coming-of-age dilemmas that scholars have wrestled with. Focusing on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Dickens's David Copperfield, James's What Maisie Knew, Forster's The Longest Journey, Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, and Santayana's The Last Puritan, Jeffers writes in a fresh, engaging style meant to give criticism a liveliness and even brilliance it has in recent decades often lacked.

THOMAS JEFFERS, a Yale Ph.D., teaches literature at Marquette University, USA, and earlier taught at Cornell and Harvard, where he was a Mellon Fellow. He is author of Samuel Butler Revalued (1981) and Editor of The Norman Podhoretz Reader (2004). He has published essays in the Yale Review, the Hudson Review, Raritan, and Commentary, and is now working on the authorized biography of Norman Podhoretz.