A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows Stephen Dedalus, a boy from a Catholic Dublin family, from his earliest memories to the eve of his departure from Ireland at about twenty. Its five chapters are written in a style that grows with him, from the nursery language of the opening, in which his father tells him a story about a moocow and baby tuckoo, to the abstract arguments and private diary of the last chapter.
Theme
Coming of Age
65 works in the library take up coming of age, from Romeo and Juliet to The Giver.
Works
Meg Murry is a stubborn, clumsy, unhappy girl with glasses and braces who is doing badly at school, and whose physicist father has been missing for more than a year on secret government work. On a stormy night she comes down to the kitchen of the family's country house to find her mother, a scientist, and her five-year-old brother Charles Wallace, an uncannily gifted child the village thinks is slow.
Across Five Aprils follows the Creighton family of Jasper County in southern Illinois through the Civil War, from April 1861 to April 1865, as seen by the youngest son, Jethro, who is nine when the story opens. The family farm is worked by Matt and Ellen Creighton and their grown and growing children: John, a married son with a family of his own nearby; Bill, thoughtful and gentle, the brother Jethro loves best; Tom, eager for adventure; Jenny, close to Jethro in spirit; and their cousin Eb Carron, raised in the household.
Adam of the Road follows eleven-year-old Adam Quartermayne through a year of wandering in the England of Edward I, beginning in June 1294. Adam is boarding at the abbey school of St. Albans, learning his letters with his friend Perkin, a ploughman's son who longs to study at Oxford, while his red spaniel Nick lodges with an old woman, Dame Malkin, because dogs are not allowed at school.
Huckleberry Finn tells his own story in the speech of a half-schooled Missouri boy, some forty or fifty years before the book appeared. After the treasure found at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Widow Douglas has taken Huck in to civilize him, while her sister Miss Watson drills him in manners and spelling.
Paul Bäumer, a young German infantryman not yet twenty, tells in the present tense of his last two years in the Great War. He and his classmates Albert Kropp, Müller and Leer enlisted together, urged on by their schoolmaster Kantorek, and now serve in a company that has just come out of the line with eighty men left of a hundred and fifty.
Anne of Green Gables opens in Avonlea, a farming village on Prince Edward Island, where the elderly brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert have arranged to adopt a boy from a Nova Scotia orphan asylum to help on their farm. Through a mistake the child sent is Anne Shirley, an eleven-year-old red-haired girl who talks without stopping, renames everything she loves and has survived a hard childhood by imagination.
Bedtime for Frances is a picture book about a little badger who cannot settle down for the night. At seven o'clock Mother and Father tell Frances it is bedtime, and she begins a string of requests: a glass of milk, a piggyback ride to her room, a kiss from each parent, her teddy bear and her doll, and then another round of kisses.
Captains Courageous begins in the smoking-room of a transatlantic liner in fog, where fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne, the spoiled only son of an American railroad and shipping millionaire, brags about his pocket money and annoys the grown men. Sick from a strong cigar, he goes out on deck, is pitched overboard by a roll of the ship, and is pulled out of the sea by Manuel, a Portuguese fisherman in a dory from the Gloucester schooner We're Here.
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch is a fictionalized biography of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773–1838), the self-taught Salem mathematician whose New American Practical Navigator became the standard American guide to navigation at sea. It opens in Salem, Massachusetts, during the Revolutionary War, when Nat is a small boy in a seafaring family led by his father, Captain Habakkuk Bowditch.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
Farmer Boy tells about a year and more in the boyhood of Almanzo Wilder, the author's future husband, on his family's prosperous farm near Malone in northern New York in the 1860s. Almanzo is almost nine when the book opens in January, walking to the schoolhouse with his brother Royal and his sisters Eliza Jane and Alice.
Father Goriot opens in 1819 in the Maison Vauquer, a shabby boarding house in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève on the poor edge of the Latin Quarter, which Balzac describes room by room, smell by smell, before introducing its lodgers. Among them are Eugène de Rastignac, a law student from a poor noble family near Angoulême; the hearty, mocking Vautrin, who claims to be a retired merchant; the spinster Mlle.
Great Expectations is the first-person story of Philip Pirrip, called Pip, an orphan brought up by hand by his harsh elder sister and her gentle husband Joe Gargery, the village blacksmith on the Kent marshes. On Christmas Eve, in the churchyard where his parents lie, an escaped convict seizes Pip and makes him bring a file and food; Pip steals both from his sister's house, and the convict is later recaptured struggling with another fugitive.
Henry IV, Part 1 shows King Henry IV, who took the crown from Richard II, troubled by rebellion and by his own son. In Act I the king, hoping to lead a crusade to atone for Richard's fall, hears instead of war on the Welsh and Scottish borders, and envies the Earl of Northumberland his son Harry Percy, called Hotspur, who has won a victory at Holmedon, while his own heir, Prince Hal, wastes his days in the taverns of Eastcheap with the fat old knight Sir John Falstaff.
If— is a father's counsel to his son on what it takes to become a man, delivered as one long conditional sentence. Kipling printed it in Rewards and Fairies (1910), a book of linked stories for children in which poems sit between the tales; If— follows the story Brother Square-Toes.
Island of the Blue Dolphins is narrated by Karana, a girl of about twelve who lives in the village of Ghalas-at on a small island off the California coast in the early nineteenth century; her people call it the Island of the Blue Dolphins. A red-sailed ship brings Captain Orlov, a Russian, and a crew of Aleut hunters, who ask Karana's father, Chief Chowig, to let them take sea otter in exchange for goods.
Jane Eyre is the life story, told by Jane herself, of an orphan girl who grows into a governess and finally a wife, keeping her conscience and her self-respect through poverty, temptation and grief. At ten Jane lives at Gateshead Hall with her aunt by marriage, Mrs. Reed, who resents her, and her bullying cousin John.
Johnny Tremain follows a Boston apprentice from the summer of 1773 to the first day of the American Revolution in April 1775. Johnny, fourteen, is the most gifted of the three apprentices in the silversmith shop of old Ephraim Lapham, a pious man who warns him about pride by having him read Leviticus 26:19; the next two chapters take their titles from that verse.
Kidnapped is narrated by David Balfour, a seventeen-year-old Lowland Scot who in June 1751, after his father's death, leaves the village of Essendean with a letter for the House of Shaws. The minister Mr. Campbell sends him off with a shilling, a Bible and a handwritten recipe for lily-of-the-valley water, and with the news that he is a Balfour of Shaws.
Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's book about the great river in two eras: the steamboat age of his youth and the changed river he revisited in 1882. It opens with three chapters of history and lore, from De Soto and La Salle to the keelboat and raft men, including a long raft episode with the boy Huck Finn borrowed from the novel Twain was then writing.
Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers is Ralph Moody's memoir of the four years, 1906 to 1910, that his family spent on a Colorado ranch, told from the point of view of the boy he was, eight years old when the story begins. His father, Charles, has a persistent cough from his work in a New Hampshire mill, and when a cousin, Phil, who sells gold stock in Denver, promises better prospects, the family leaves East Rochester for a run-down rented ranch near Fort Logan, southwest of Denver.
Little Women follows the four March sisters growing up in a New England town during and after the American Civil War, while their father serves as an army chaplain. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and longs for fine things; Jo, a tomboyish aspiring writer with a quick temper, is the heart of the book; Beth is shy, gentle and musical; and Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain.
My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.
My Side of the Mountain is the first-person record of Sam Gribley, a boy of about twelve who leaves his family's crowded New York City apartment to live alone for a year in the Catskill Mountains. Sam had told his father he meant to go to the old Gribley farm, land his great-grandfather once worked near the town of Delhi, and his father laughed and let him try, sure he would be back by morning.
Northanger Abbey follows Catherine Morland, the unremarkable seventeen-year-old daughter of a country clergyman, whom the narrator teasingly insists no one would have supposed born to be a heroine. Catherine is a devoted reader of Gothic novels, especially Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.
Old Yeller is narrated by Travis Coates, who looks back on the year he was fourteen, in the late 1860s, on his family's homestead near the settlement of Salt Licks in the Texas Hill Country. After the Civil War cattle money is scarce, so Papa joins the other men of the settlement on a long drive to sell cattle in Kansas, leaving Travis as the man of the place with Mama and his little brother, Arliss.
Peter and Wendy, the 1911 novel that grew out of J. M. Barrie's play Peter Pan, opens in the London nursery of the Darling family: Mr. Darling, a clerk anxious about money and dignity; Mrs. Darling, who tidies her children's minds each night; Wendy, John and Michael; and Nana, a Newfoundland dog who serves as their nurse. Mrs. Darling finds the name Peter in her children's thoughts and later sees a strange boy at the nursery window; Nana snaps the window shut on his shadow.
Prince Caspian begins a year after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are waiting on a railway platform on their way back to school when they are pulled out of England and set down on a wooded island beside a ruined castle.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of two young lovers from feuding families in Verona, compressed by Shakespeare into about four days. A sonnet Prologue announces that a pair of star-crossed lovers will end their parents' strife by their deaths.
Sam the Minuteman is an easy-to-read story of the first battle of the American Revolution, told through a boy who lives through it. Sam Brown lives with his mother and father on a farm in Lexington, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1775.
Sanshirō follows Ogawa Sanshirō, a young graduate of the higher school in Kumamoto, through his first autumn and winter as a student at Tokyo Imperial University in the late Meiji period. The novel opens on the long train journey from Kyushu.
Shane is a short Western novel in sixteen chapters, told years afterward by Bob Starrett, who was about eleven in the summer of 1889 when a stranger rode into his family's Wyoming valley. The rider, dressed in dark, fine clothes and calling himself only Shane, stops at the homestead of Joe Starrett, Bob's father, and Joe's wife, Marian.
In a Tuscan village the carpenter Mastro Cherry finds a log that cries out when he strikes it, and gladly hands it to his poor friend Geppetto, who carves it into a marionette and names him Pinocchio. The puppet runs off before his feet are finished, gets Geppetto taken to jail, and kills the Talking Cricket with a hammer when it warns him that disobedient boys come to grief.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a comic and nostalgic novel of boyhood set in the 1840s in St. Petersburg, a small Missouri town on the Mississippi modelled on Twain's Hannibal. Tom is an orphan living with his kind, anxious Aunt Polly, his priggish half-brother Sid and his cousin Mary.
The Bears on Hemlock Mountain is a short chapter book about Jonathan, an eight-year-old boy who lives with his mother and father in a stone farmhouse at the foot of Hemlock Mountain in Pennsylvania, long ago. The mountain is really a big hill, and everyone tells Jonathan that there are no bears on it.
The Black Arrow is set in England during the Wars of the Roses, when York and Lancaster fought for the crown and lesser lords changed sides as fortune moved. Richard Shelton, called Dick, is the young ward of Sir Daniel Brackley, a grasping knight who holds the Moat House at Tunstall and has grown rich by seizing other men's lands.
The Borrowers is told within a frame. A girl called Kate, about ten, sits crocheting with old Mrs May, who lives in two rooms of Kate's parents' house.
The Bronze Bow is set in Galilee in the years of Jesus' public ministry, under Roman rule. Its hero, Daniel bar Jamin, is eighteen and has lived for five years with an outlaw band in the hills above his village of Ketzah, near Capernaum.
The Courage of Sarah Noble tells, in eleven short chapters, how eight-year-old Sarah Noble went with her father, John Noble, into the Connecticut wilderness in 1707 to build a house for their family. The rest of the Nobles stay behind in Massachusetts.
The Door in the Wall is set in England in the fourteenth century, in the reign of Edward III, during the years of the Black Death. Robin, the ten-year-old son of the knight Sir John de Bureford and his wife Lady Maud, has been raised to expect the life of a nobleman's son: he is to go as a page to the household of Sir Peter de Lindsay, learn the arts of chivalry and one day become a knight like his father.
Jonas is eleven and lives with his father, a Nurturer who cares for newborns, his mother, who holds an important post in the Department of Justice, and his younger sister Lily in a tidy, enclosed Community where nearly everything is decided for its citizens. Families are assigned, each with one son and one daughter; babies are born to Birthmothers and given out at the yearly December Ceremony; children receive bicycles at Nine and jobs at Twelve; precise language is enforced with public apologies; everyone takes a daily pill once the Stirrings of adolescent desire begin; and those who break the rules three times, the old, and newborns who fail to thrive are "released" to a vague Elsewhere.
The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children is Charles Kingsley's retelling of three Greek hero legends, Perseus, the Argonauts and Theseus, written for his children Rose, Maurice and Mary. The preface is signed from Farley Court in Advent 1855, and the book was published by Macmillan in 1856.
Tom Jones tells the story of a foundling raised by a good country gentleman, his expulsion from home, his adventures on the road and in London, and his final restoration and marriage. The eighteen books are each opened by an essay in which the narrator talks with the reader about the art of writing, critics, love, or human nature.
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again tells how Bilbo Baggins, a comfortable, respectable hobbit of Bag-End under the Hill, is drawn into an adventure he never wanted. The wizard Gandalf marks his door, and thirteen dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield arrive for an unexpected party.
The Horse and His Boy takes place during the golden age of Narnia, while the four Pevensie children reign at Cair Paravel, and it happens mostly in Calormen, the hot, crowded empire far to the south. Shasta, a boy of about eleven, lives in a fishing village with Arsheesh, a hard man who works him like a servant.
The Jungle Book is a collection of seven animal stories, each followed by a song or poem. The first three tell of Mowgli, a man's cub raised by wolves in the Seeonee hills of central India.
The Phantom Tollbooth is a comic fantasy about Milo, a boy so bored that nothing seems worth doing, learning, or even noticing. One afternoon he finds a large package in his room containing a toy tollbooth, a map of unfamiliar lands, coins and a rule book.
The Princess and Curdie is George MacDonald's sequel to The Princess and the Goblin, set about a year after the goblins were defeated. Curdie, the miner's son, now nearly thirteen, has grown dull and doubtful; he half believes that Princess Irene's great-great-grandmother was only a child's dream.
The Red Badge of Courage follows Henry Fleming, a young private of the 304th New York, through two days of fighting in an unnamed Civil War battle that readers have long identified with Chancellorsville in May 1863. Crane calls him almost always simply the youth.
The Sign of the Beaver takes place in the Maine woods in 1768. Matt Hallowell, twelve years old and about to turn thirteen, has helped his father clear land and build a log cabin on a new claim.
The Story of a Soul is the autobiography of Thérèse Martin, a young Carmelite nun of Lisieux in Normandy, written at the request of her superiors in the last years of her short life and published a year after her death. In the library text, Thomas N. Taylor's 1912 translation, it is arranged in eleven chapters addressed to her sister Pauline, by then Mother Agnes of Jesus, and framed by a prologue on her parents and birth and an epilogue on her final illness.
The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is John Muir's account of his first twenty-five years, from a Scottish seaside town to the edge of what he calls the University of the Wilderness. In the first chapter he remembers Dunbar on the stormy North Sea coast: rambles with his grandfather David Gilrye, who taught him his letters from shop signs, scrambles over the ruins of Dunbar Castle, fights and dares with schoolmates, the servant girls' terrifying tales of the Dandy Doctors who were said to steal children for the Edinburgh dissecting rooms, and a school where Mr. Lyon and his father together drilled grammar and Bible verses into him by memory and the rod.
The Sword in the Stone is T. H. White's comic and affectionate account of the boyhood of King Arthur, set in a merry, anachronistic Middle Ages. Arthur, called the Wart, is an orphan of unknown birth raised by the kindly Sir Ector at the Castle of the Forest Sauvage alongside Ector's son Kay, an older, proud and often unhappy boy who will one day be a knight while the Wart expects to be his squire.
The Three Musketeers follows a poor young gentleman from Gascony through three years of duels, court intrigue and war under Louis XIII, from 1625 to the fall of La Rochelle in 1628. D'Artagnan, eighteen years old, rides to Paris on a comic yellow pony with fifteen crowns, his father's advice and a letter of introduction to M. de Tréville, captain of the King's Musketeers.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the third Chronicle of Narnia to be published. Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are spending the summer holidays with their aunt and uncle in Cambridge, where their cousin Eustace Clarence Scrubb, a priggish, bullying boy raised on modern notions, makes them miserable.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond is a historical novel in twenty-one chapters set in Connecticut Colony in 1687 and 1688. Katherine Tyler, called Kit, is sixteen and has grown up in freedom and comfort on her grandfather's plantation in Barbados.
Amory Blaine, the only son of the wealthy, eccentric Beatrice Blaine and her ineffectual husband Stephen, is raised in luxury, travels with his mother, and grows up handsome, clever and sure of his own superiority. After two years in Minneapolis and a spell at a New England boarding school, where he is unpopular and then a football hero, he goes to Princeton, drawn by its glamour.
Through the Looking-Glass is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. On a snowy afternoon, the day before a bonfire she hopes to see, Alice sits by the fire scolding her black kitten, wonders what the room behind the drawing-room mirror is like, climbs onto the mantelpiece and passes through the glass.
In December 1965 a group of adults and students met at Christopher Eckhardt's home in Des Moines, Iowa, and decided to show their objection to the fighting in Vietnam and support for a truce by wearing black armbands over the holidays and fasting on 16 December and New Year's Eve. The principals of the Des Moines schools learned of the plan and on 14 December adopted a policy that any student wearing an armband would be asked to remove it and suspended if he refused.
To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated by Jean Louise Finch, called Scout, looking back as an adult on three years of her childhood, from the summer she was nearly six, in Maycomb, a small, poor county seat in Alabama during the Depression of the 1930s. She lives with her older brother Jem, their widowed father Atticus, a lawyer and state legislator, and Calpurnia, the Black cook who helps raise them.
Treasure Island is narrated mainly by Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper whose ordinary life is transformed when the old pirate Billy Bones comes to the Admiral Benbow inn. Bones brings a sea chest, a map and danger in the form of former shipmates, including Black Dog and the blind beggar Pew.
Understood Betsy follows nine-year-old Elizabeth Ann, an orphan raised in a medium-sized Midwestern city by her Great-aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances, a piano teacher who has studied child-rearing books and correspondence courses and is determined that her niece shall be thoroughly understood. Elizabeth Ann is thin, pale and frightened of dogs, thunder and examinations, and Aunt Frances shares and rehearses every fear with her.
Where the Red Fern Grows is narrated by Billy Colman, now a grown man in a town far from the Ozarks. Walking home from work one evening, he rescues an old redbone hound from a pack of town dogs, feeds it and lets it go home, and the encounter brings back the story of his boyhood.
White Fang follows a wolf-dog from his birth in a cave in the frozen North to a sunny estate in California. The novel opens with two men, Bill and Henry, hauling a coffin across the Yukon wilderness while a starving wolf pack trails them.