The Best Coming of Age Books, From Holden Caulfield to Alice Munro
Coming of age novels tend to stay with readers longer than most. They cover the years when a person works out who they are, and the best of them have been passed between generations for decades.
This list gathers seven of the best coming of age books, ordered by how much interest our readers show in them. The selection leans on evidence rather than opinion: bestseller status, places on the Modern Library and Time lists, school reading lists, and the standing of the authors, including a Nobel laureate.
Each entry explains what the book is about and what it is known for, so you can judge which one suits you next.
The Catcher In The Rye
Salinger's 1951 novel is the coming of age book most people name first. Holden Caulfield narrates a long weekend in New York after being expelled from Pencey Preparatory Academy, taking in angst, alienation and what he sees as the phoniness of the adult world. Around a million copies still sell each year, with total sales past 65 million, and the book appears on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923 and on the Modern Library's list for the 20th century. It also placed 15th in the BBC's 2003 Big Read survey, and remains one of the most frequently banned books in American schools.
All The Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy's 1992 novel was a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into a film in 2000. It follows themes of love, freedom and adventure as a young man comes of age. If you want McCarthy at his most accessible, this is usually the recommended starting point.
The Red Pony
Steinbeck's episodic novella, published in full in 1937, follows Jody Tiflin on his father's California ranch. The first story, "The Gift", turns on a red pony colt named Gabilan and ends in a scene of real brutality involving buzzards. The book deals with the fallibility of adults, the inevitability of death and the hard entrance into manhood, which is why it has long been a fixture on school reading lists.
Of Human Bondage
Generally agreed to be Maugham's masterpiece, this 1915 novel traces Philip Carey from the death of his mother at nine through a vicarage childhood, art school in Paris and medical training in London, with a ruinous infatuation with a waitress named Mildred at its centre. Maugham drew heavily on his own life, though he insisted more of it was invention than autobiography. The Modern Library ranked it number 66 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The title comes from a section of Spinoza's Ethics.
Captains Courageous
Kipling's 1897 novel is his only book set entirely in North America. Harvey Cheyne Jr., the spoiled fifteen-year-old son of a railroad magnate, is washed overboard from a steamship and pulled from the Atlantic by the crew of a Gloucester fishing schooner, who put him to work as a cabin boy to pay off his debt. Teddy Roosevelt praised it in 1900 for describing "in the liveliest way just what a boy should be and do". A straightforward and durable story about work turning a boy into someone useful.
Dandelion Wine
Bradbury's 1957 novel is set in the summer of 1928 in the fictional Green Town, Illinois, based on his own childhood home of Waukegan. Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding is loosely patterned after Bradbury himself, and the wine his grandfather makes from dandelion petals stands in for the whole of summer, bottled. It is the first book in the Green Town Trilogy and appears on Time's list of 100 novels.
Lives of Girls and Women
Published in 1971 by the Canadian writer who later won the Nobel Prize in Literature, this book is marketed as a novel but reads as a set of linked stories, each narrated by Del Jordan. Del grows up on the edge of the small southern Ontario town of Jubilee and later in its centre, an outsider who chafes at small-town life while resisting any comparison with her mother. It is frequently read as a feminist text, and almost all the important characters are women.
Seven books, spanning 1897 to 1992 and three countries. Whether you start with Salinger or with Munro, each one offers a different answer to the same question about how people become themselves.